Baseline Food Loss and Waste Report Launched

A research team from the University of Otago’s Department of Human Nutrition carried out the project.

This report provides a nationwide snapshot of food loss and waste across the entire food supply chain, including where the food ends up (eg, landfill, compost, animal feed). Because data related to all products and stages of the food supply chain were not available for a specifically stated single year, data from 2015-2022 was used to approximate a 12-month time period.

• 1.22 million tonnes of food is lost or wasted in New Zealand every year.
• That’s 237kg per person, annually.
• Food loss and waste makes up 5 to 10% of our total food production.
• The biggest contributors in the food supply chain are:
  
  • Primary production (37%)
  • Households (30%)
  • Processing (27%)

The report highlights significant data gaps in some areas. For this reason, results should be interpreted holistically.

While New Zealand’s proportion of food loss and waste is lower than the global average (30-40%), differences in definitions and the ways countries calculate food loss and waste makes international comparisons challenging.

This research is a critical step toward understanding and reducing food loss and waste in New Zealand. It provides a baseline for future measures, will help inform policy, and clearly outlines where more work is needed to close data gaps. We hope the findings encourage more research to improve data coverage and accuracy.

Thank you to Otago University and all those who contributed to this research.

Read the full report - Aotearoa New Zealand Baseline Food Loss and Waste Project.