West Coast Retailers Reduce Unsold Food Rates by 30% in Five Years

Unsold food rates have decreased by 30%—the largest reduction ever recorded—since 2019 among food retailers on the West Coast, according to a new report from the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment (PCFWC), the West Coast’s public-private partnership focused on reducing food waste by 50% by 2030, and the U.S. Food Waste Pact (Pact), the national voluntary agreement for food businesses focused on reducing food waste through precompetitive collaboration and data sharing. The report also establishes national baselines for food waste generation at retail and corporate foodservice businesses, the first datasets of their kind, which will be used to track future progress.

Due to a lack of actionable data on food waste causes, destinations, and impacts that can be used by food businesses to develop sustainability goals and strategies, data measurement and reporting are key programmatic pillars of both the PCFWC and the Pact. By analyzing anonymized data from business signatories, PCFWC and Pact resource partners ReFED and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) determine the direction of intervention pilot projects and other precompetitive collaborative efforts. The 30% reduction in unsold food rates over five years on the West Coast indicates a continued decline, a testament to the importance of these critical data reporting efforts.

In addition to the fifth year of regional retail data from the PCFWC, ReFED and WWF are publishing the first year of U.S. Food Waste Pact national retail data, as well as the first year of national foodservice data. These two datasets establish national baselines of food waste generation for retail and corporate dining foodservice, and as the first datasets of their kind, they represent a major contribution to the field, allowing other businesses around the country to track how their own efforts measure up. The report identifies that national retail unsold food accounts for $42.3 billion dollars in lost sales and shines a light on food waste reduction as a critical business strategy for cost savings.

Read Creating a Sustainable Future through Food Waste Reduction 2024 Year-End Report and the accompanying Progress on Reducing Food Waste 2024 Year-End Data Report.

Find the full press release on the U.S. Food Waste Pact website.