Probably the Next Most Impactful Step in Solving the Food Loss and Waste Problem

Published on October 8, 2026 3:10 PM GMT TL;DR Food loss and waste (FLW) are a surprisingly large global problem, with consequences for climate, land use, food security, and the resources embedded in food that is never eaten. Yet researching the problem—especially understanding where, why, and how much food is wasted—often requires expensive, labour-intensive primary data collection. This post explains the FLW problem and its consequences; explains why data is so important for this problem and why we don’t yet have enough of it; and suggests a solution (that we are currently developing) to the data problem – a data-sharing platform, specifically for this field. Daphi is a not-for-profit initiative working to bring FLW to zero. One of our vectors of actions is to increase both quality and quantity of the research about the topic. At the end of this post, we talk about a service we would like to make available to support FLW prevention, as discussed in the post itself.   Method of Writing and Acknowledgements I used an LLM to which I prompted the topic, the goal of this document, some notes on style, external resources, and some materials I already had written. I then fact-checked the entire document, merged data from different sources that the LLM failed to merge, and made some phrasing and style adjustments. I then sent it to Roy Schulman and Edo Arad for review (thank you guys!) and made final edits. All mistakes are mine; and all opinions I form based on these sources are mine and may not represent their authors’ opinions.   Why Food Loss and Waste Matter A large share of the food produced for human consumption never gets eaten. According to the UN Environment Programme's (UNEP) Food Waste Index 2024, around 1.05 billion tonnes of food were wasted in 2022 at the household, food service, and retail stages alone—around 19% of the food available to consumers. This is in addition to an estimated 13% of food being lost earlier in the supply chain, between post-harvest and retail. Hence, the total annual global food waste amounts to about 1.75 billion tonnes[1], and the proportion of food that is wasted is about a third of the entire global food production each year. The consequences are not limited to the value of the food itself. Food that is produced and then wasted also represents wasted agricultural land, water, energy, labour, transportation, refrigeration, and other inputs. UNEP estimates that FLW are associated with 8–10% of global greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG) and around 28% of the world's agricultural land being used to produce food that is ultimately lost or wasted. The scale of the problem has also attracted attention from researchers and organizations working on climate and global priorities. For example, Project Drawdown models reducing FLW by 25-50% as the eighth most impactful intervention from over 50 interventions rated as “highly recommended” (in addition to some other, less-recommended interventions)[2], emphasizing the importance of taking actions in this area. In other words, there seems to be a lot of potential value in understanding this problem better.   A Word About Poverty and Related Topics When dealing with FLW, there is also a food security[3] dimension to the discussion that is worth mentioning. According to the WHO, as of 2026, 2.1 billion people experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. Some argue (see references section) that reducing FLW should increase food security, although it does not mean that reducing food waste automatically translates into greater food security—the causal chain is more complex.   But Knowing That Food Is Wasted Is Not Enough There are at least two broad ways of responding to food waste. One is food rescue: recover food that would otherwise be discarded, and redirect it to another use—for example, through food banks or redistribution organizations. The other is prevention: understand why food becomes waste in the first place and change the processes, incentives, technologies, or behaviours that cause it. While food rescue only reduces damage caused by the waste itself, prevention includes the impact food rescue generates plus a likely increase in food security, a decrease in pollution, a decrease in net-negative impact land use (allowing for more effective uses of this land), and more (see references section for more information). Moreover, these approaches are at least partially mutually exclusive (see references section). Hence, if we wish to increase FLW prevention, a particularly difficult research question arises: What interventions actually prevent food from becoming waste or lost, at what cost, and in which contexts? Answering that question requires much more than knowing the total amount of FLW. To answer this question, it will be helpful to know, for example: Which foods are being wasted / lost? At which stage of the supply chain? In what quantities? Why are they being discarded? How does this vary by country, income level, business ty