A new report from the U.S. Food Waste Pact, a collaborative initiative of 30 food businesses across the country led by ReFED and World Wildlife Fund, shows reductions in the amount of food being wasted nationwide by grocery retail and foodservice companies in 2024 compared to 2023.
“Being able to measure these kinds of trends is a core reason for why we launched the U.S. Food Waste Pact over two years ago,” says Jackie Suggitt, VP of business initiatives and community engagement at ReFED said. “Measuring food waste is critical to making progress to reduce it. This kind of data allows our signatories and food businesses across the country to take informed and targeted action against food waste.”
Key takeaways:
· This is the second year that Pact signatories have reported these data, with 2023 results serving as the inaugural benchmark for food waste in these sectors.
· Unsold food rates, the metric that most accurately reflects waste reduction in the retail sector, decreased by 1.1% from 2023 to 2024, despite an increase in tons wasted. This means that while market fluctuations and business performance across the retail sector resulted in more food passing through grocery stores, food waste still decreased based on the share of retail inventory that went unsold.
· The food efficiency rate, the metric that most accurately reflects waste reduction in the foodservice sector, decreased by 5.7% from 2023 to 2024, which was accompanied by a 4,000 ton reduction in waste and a $15.9 million decrease in the wholesale cost of surplus food.
· Pact pilot projects to test and scale solutions to food waste resulted in significant reductions. To date, these pilots have demonstrated food waste reduction averaging more than 50%.
- Across four pilots, frontline workers generated 750-plus food waste reduction ideas and implemented over 10 ideas, resulting in an average food waste reduction of 66%.
- One whole chain pilot from 2025 that tested a solution to utilize more strawberries in the foodservice sector reduced on-farm strawberry waste by 51%.
- A low-waste events pilot implementing measurement practices and testing several solutions to back-of-house waste reduced 55% of food waste in key food categories across participating sites.
“Our pilots show impressive proof of concept that, if brought to scale, could have staggering impacts on food waste,” says Pete Pearson, VP of food loss and waste at World Wildlife Fund says. “It points to the need for more collaboration across the supply chain to leverage simple solutions with high returns.”
“This was a landmark year for the U.S. Food Waste Pact,” says Dana Gunders, president of ReFED. “Our signatories are deeply invested in learning from each other, and the impact of that shared knowledge shows. Whether on a micro scale through pilots or on a macro scale through their own business initiatives, they are taking data-informed action to reduce food waste, and their collaboration is accelerating progress on that shared goal. We’re excited to deepen our engagement with signatories this year as we focus on expanding our resources and scaling solution adoption.”
