Almost 900,000 perfectly edible, freshly prepared meals end up in UK bins each day because they haven’t been sold in time by restaurants, cafés, hotels and pubs, new figures suggest.
The data, compiled by food waste app Too Good To Go, suggest overall, more than 320 million edible, unsold meals are thrown away by UK food establishments every year – enough meals to feed everyone in the country five times over.
The figures come after Michael Gove announced a £15m fund to combat food waste in the UK, but this funding will focus on reducing food waste from manufacturers, rather than food establishments.
The Too Good To Go app aims to connect hungry humans with unsold food from food retailers. Businesses ranging from bakeries and food trucks to supermarkets and hotel chains can sign up to flag their surplus food. Members of the public can then “rescue” food destined for the bin at discounted prices.
The latest figures were compiled by estimating overall UK food waste based on data from current app users; business members currently list an average of 3.3 surplus meals per day per per store, and with more than 260,000 restaurants, cafes, catering businesses, mobile caterers, takeaway, hotels and pubs in the UK, the numbers soon add up.
As well as the cost to the environment, figures from waste charity Wrap state that food waste costs UK businesses over £2.5 million every week.
Commenting on the latest research, Hayley Conick, UK managing director at Too Good To Go, said: “No one leaves the lights on when they leave the house. Yet whether it’s in restaurants, food shops or our own homes we don’t think twice about throwing away perfectly good food. 1.6bn tonnes of food is thrown away globally each year – and that’s 1.6bn tonnes too many.
“By creating a new market for surplus food we make sure that more food gets eaten leaving businesses, consumers and the planet as winners in the process.”