Reducing Food Waste

Reducing Food Waste header

With a third of all food produced globally wasted every year, we are clear about the collective role we must play in helping to drive permanent change across our industry. We’re making good use of technology to understand our food waste footprint and are working in partnership to halve it by 2030.


Our strategy

We recognise that food waste is not only a moral issue, but a key contributor to climate change too. Wasting food is a waste of the energy to grow, harvest, process and cook and food waste in landfill can cause methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas. Working in partnership with our clients, we aim to halve food waste across the Group by 2030.

Delivering on our sustainability strategy starts by understanding why food is being wasted. Each year, measurement technology is introduced in new units as we continue the global roll out of our strategy helping our kitchen teams measure, monitor and reduce food waste. We use different systems in different markets, all of which are driving down food waste and improving our oversight. 


Case Studies

Team member celebrating Stop Food Waste Day 2023

Taking global action for food waste

Compass Group USA introduced Stop Food Waste Day as an International Day of Action, raising awareness of the social and environmental impacts of food waste.

Our commitment to tackling food waste is aligned to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development goal #12.5 as we work to halve food waste by 2030, and stretches from working with suppliers, implementing sustainable practices in our operations and raising the public profile of the issue.

Stop Food Waste Day is not just an event, it is woven into the very fabric of our corporate culture. Our chefs and frontline teams understand the opportunity we have to empower everyone across our value chain with innovative strategies to reduce food waste. 

Visit the Stop Food Waste Day website

This year we marked our eighth annual Stop Food Waste Day, reaching over 112 million people via print and news publications, and well as 9.2 million+ on social media throughout the month of April.

  • Our chefs and frontline teams inspired clients and customers globally with food waste reduction inspired menus.
  • Compass Sweden launched ‘Unwaste Yourself’ – an innovative AI tool helping consumers reduce food waste.
  • Compass USA and Restaurant Associates brought together 125 clients and thought leaders for the first annual Waste Warrior Awards in NYC.
  • We also encouraged thousands of clients, colleagues, and customers to take the #StopFoodWasteDay pledge, joining us in the fight against food waste. This year, many large corporates also joined the conversation from our industry and beyond, demonstrating our scale and reach 

Compass Group’s Global Culinary Forum

Chefs across the Group are driving transformative sustainability efforts within the food industry from the bottom up, thanks to our Global Culinary Forum’s educational webinars called ‘Chefs Creating Change’. These webinars are intended for our frontline chefs and centred around the key issue of food waste.

They provide a platform for our chefs globally to meet, deepen their understanding of food waste reduction, share best practice, and exchange expertise in areas such as procurement, inventory management, menu creation and technology application.

These ground-breaking events engaged over 3,000 chefs globally in the largest ever gathering of Compass culinary experts.

Learn more about our Global Culinary Forum

Global expansion of our Waste Not 2.0 technology

Waste Not 2.0 is a state-of the art tablet-based food waste tracking programme, designed by our Compass Group USA chefs and rolled out across 12 countries in nine languages. It efficiently enables kitchen teams to identify waste-reduction opportunities that go beyond typical trim, bones, core, and peel waste.

The digital platform offers managers with intuitive tools to promptly analyse data, measure and report the carbon impact of kitchen waste to develop long-lasting solutions to fight against food waste. In the USA, the Group’s largest market globally, the Waste Not 2.0 tool has been instrumental in reducing food waste by up to 45% in several pilot programmes.

Following this success, Compass Group USA has committed to implementing the system in thousands of kitchens throughout the US, while also making the tool available to our culinary teams in other markets worldwide.

In total, we have deployed Waste Not to more than 3,500 sites worldwide and also have a large-scale launch underway in Canada.

Two Compass chefs in kitchen using Waste Not 2.0 food waste tracking system

“I always knew we should and could be tracking waste but was overwhelmed at how to do it. This programme made it so easy!” 

Snap Inc.’s General Manager John Leone.

Repurpose Programme - India

Compass Group India has been combating food waste through its innovative repurpose program. With over 150 carefully crafted recipes, once-discarded ingredients find new life as daily delights such as chutneys, dips, and relishes, spiking up your food and transforming the mundane into the extraordinary.

Our chefs are repurposing the fibrous pulp of vegetables and fruits to prepare jams, marmalade, patties, and kofta, adding further depth and variety to our offerings, and even vegetable and fruit peels, often overlooked, are repurposed into infused water, offering a refreshing twist and promoting hydration. This culinary revolution not only diversifies our consumers' palates, but also significantly diminishes our ecological footprint.

Since its inception 18 months ago, the repurpose initiative has flourished. Taking Bangalore as an example, on a monthly basis, they repurpose an impressive 30,000 kilograms of food, with this figure steadily climbing. The initiative has seen widespread adoption, with over 30 sites in Bangalore actively participating. 

Case Study Archive

Transforming cooking waste to Biofuel - Austria

In Austria, we are working to repurpose our cooking waste into biofuel. Instead of disposing our cooking waste, our partner, Münzer collects the waste and transforms it into biodiesel, which is an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels.

More than 60 of our Business and Industry (B&I) sites in Austria are signed up to have their waste collected, averaging over 465 tonnes of food waste collection each year. In 2022, we also repurposed 39,629kg of used cooking oil, which is treated and processed into ecologically sustainable biodiesel, equating to a saving of 108,208kg of CO2.

Dedicated commitment to food waste reduction - Australia

Compass Group Australia and Foodbuy Australia have proudly become signatories to the Australian Food Waste Pact. This voluntary agreement brings organisations together to create and share solutions and strategies dedicated to food waste prevention.

As a leading procurement and supply chain provider to the Australian food and hospital industry, Compass Group’s commitment is able to drives sustainable change at scale. The signatories pledge to cut the 7.6 million tonnes of food waste produced in Australia in half by 2030, a commitment aligned with our global target to halve food waste across the Group by 2030.