Reduce Food Waste

 Izzy: Hello and welcome to the Carbon Copy Podcast with me, Isabelle Sparrow. 

Brad: And me, Bradley Ingham. 

Izzy: We’re back with another episode in our series, Do Something Bigger, where we’re exploring ways to create meaningful, collaborative change for climate and nature where you live or work. Over the course of 2025, we’re exploring 25 different actions that can make a difference to climate and nature—so if today’s theme isn’t your thing, come back next time for something that might be! 

Brad: Today’s episode is called Reduce Food Waste. Now, let’s be honest, we do all waste quite a bit of food don’t we? 

Izzy: Well, yes, we do have a big problem with food waste. In fact if food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the US. BUT what is really worth saying straight up is that we are not just talking about the mystery Tupperware at the back of the fridge that no one’s brave enough to open. 

Brad: That’s not waste, that’s common sense. I’ll get round to it when I’m feeling brave! 

Izzy: Brad, if your leftovers are developing sentience, we have bigger problems. 

Brad: Fair point. But no, we are not just talking about that. A third of all food produced globally never gets eaten, and a lot of that waste happens in the supply chain – whether it’s wasted at the point of harvest, through the logistics not working out, or at the point of purchase – a lot of the food not only doesn’t get eaten, but doesn’t get anywhere near the dining table! 

Izzy: And, when food is wasted, we’re not just wasting the food itself—we’re wasting all the energy, water, and resources that went into growing, transporting, and packaging it. 

Brad: So, what can we do about all this waste? Well, there are some amazing people already tackling food waste in different places around the UK, and one of them is Fiona Bell from CropDrop. 

Izzy: CropDrop is a project based in South West England that rescues surplus produce from allotments and redistributes it to communities that need it—stopping good food from going to waste while also fighting food insecurity. We asked Fiona how CropDrop started and why it’s so important to reduce food waste at the source. 

Fiona: I’m Fiona Bell and I have been involved with surplus food in Bath and North East Somerset since about 2013 when I first started working with a project called FoodCycle in their branch in Bath. In 2020 when the lockdown happened, I was involved with founding a project called CropDrop which connected the allotment surplus in local allotments with local affordable food projects. Allotment people, growers actually weren’t aware of affordable food projects that were just down the road from them. Similarly the affordable food projects had seen locked gates of allotments and didn’t really think that was a place for them to get involved with and wouldn’t know what to do with a sort of odd shaped courgette or a beetroot covered in soil and slugs. So actually breaking down those barriers and connecting people was a big plus for me, you get either the project to go and collect the food from the allotment site or the allotment deliver to the food project if you can introduce them enough then they will develop all sorts of extra benefits that you hadn’t anticipated. 

Brad: That’s such a simple but brilliant idea—connecting growers who have too much with people who really need fresh food.  

Izzy: And it’s interesting because this highlights something we’ve seen before—so much of addressing climate and social issues is actually about making those connections between people who wouldn’t normally cross paths. 

Brad: Yeah exactly, this is something we also heard from Kate, who is the sustainability manager at Fooditude. She’s working on food waste at a different level—within corporate catering, where large amounts of food are distributed every day. 

Kate: So Fooditude is a corporate catering company. We’re based in London and basically our model is that we have a large central production kitchen and then all our food is cooked there and then it’s all sent out to our clients. So no client has a kitchen on site.  

We only order the ingredients in that we need to cook. So that’s quite easy to control. And then we then provide that food, our main measurement of food waste is the food that is leftover. So a lot of clients will say, I want to feed 280 people, but I don’t want to run out and people might turn up. We might have clients or you know, different people. So let’s make it for 340 people and then, you know maybe only 250 people eat. So then that’s a lot of waste and that’s the waste that’s our biggest problem.  

Even when prepping the food, we even have regular training sessions on how chefs should prep food properly to reduce that waste in the first place. If there is any waste, certain types of waste, so like the bottom of cauliflowers, for example, we have a local partner in London called The Firm and she makes kimchi from those. So we send them off. So they get made into kimchi. And we do have our own little branded, we use them for events and kind of pop-ups is Fooditude’s zero waste pickles. So we try and use whatever we have left in little jars of pickles for our little events or platters. So we do a lot with that. But even all our broccoli stems, for example, will be saved and either blended or used in a stew of some other kind. So it’s really tied into just, I wouldn’t even say we think, I think about it in particular, our chefs suggest they design the recipes in that way to try and reduce the waste as much as possible, which is really, really great. 

Izzy: That’s such a clever solution—turning waste into something valuable instead of just throwing it out. But corporate catering must have some huge challenges when it comes to food waste? Kate told us more about this. 

Kate: So there’s lots of food safety regulations that we have to follow, which are getting tighter and tighter as well. And I’d say the hardest one is events, corporate events. People really like having food for show. And I say that that’s a really big thing that is still quite a big issue and people don’t really seem to understand is just food to look nice or food to just present. 

We can’t do anything with that afterwards. So that’s quite a sad, sad challenge. So I don’t see it changing those kinds of regulations, but what we try and do is we try and slow down how much food we put out. So when our foods go to our clients, they’re in hot boxes that are set at a certain temperature and that are safe to hold in that time. So if, if we can not put it out and it stays in that box, we then distribute it if we can. So that’s kind of where we are with that. But as I said, with events, that’s all going out. So I can’t, that’s why that one’s my biggest challenge. 

Brad: That’s really frustrating—so much food wasted just because of how it looks or because people are worried about running out. 

Izzy: Yeah absolutely, it sounds like there really needs to be a total mind-shift around food and about how to “solve” the food waste issue. This is something we chatted about with Corin Bell, co-founder of Open Kitchen, a social enterprise which provides catering services across Greater Manchester, using locally sourced and grown food and intercepting food that would otherwise go to waste. 

Corin: There’s a very truncated image that gets presented that a is there is food waste, there is food poverty. We apply one problem to the other and they both magically disappear. And actually what that does is, to a certain extent, stop both of those very separate, very different issues from being dealt with in a systemic, strategic manner. 

What we need to do is completely, radically transform our food system, but in a whole host of ways, this goes way beyond food waste. You know, part of that is transforming our food system so that good food doesn’t get wasted in the first place. And we need to end poverty. Poverty doesn’t come in flavours that food poverty is just a term that we coined. If you’re making choices about whether you can afford to buy food or put the heating on, you’re not in food poverty, you’re in poverty… 

In the short term, there’s a limit to how quickly the system can change. So I think the aim was to do something in that food waste sphere that separated the environmental problem from the social problem. So I think sometimes that message, if you’re taking food that would otherwise go to waste, and it’s only being used for community outputs, the message there can sometimes be second class food for second class citizens. 

This food is not okay for nice middle-class people, but it’s fine for you. And actually the the point and it’s a, it’s an environmental problem and it’s a food safety issue. This food is perfectly edible. If we’re saying this food is perfectly edible and it can be eaten by humans, then I don’t care if you’re a millionaire. I don’t care if you’re street homeless. The point is that this food is perfectly edible. So we wanted to do something that really separated those issues. So we use food that would otherwise go to waste and ethically and sustainably purchased ingredients for our events catering business. And then all of the profits from that business go to community support outcomes. And we use exactly the same mix of ingredients, food that would otherwise go to waste, and beautiful local, sustainably produced ingredients that we buy for our community outputs as well. And that was it was kind of important for us to make that distinction. 

Izzy: I think that’s such an important point. We’re not talking about food banks and soup kitchens here – not that those kinds of services aren’t super important – but both Fooditude and Open Kitchen are providing high quality catering to paying clients. 

Brad: Yeah that’s it, and I guess it’s good to know that there are clients out there that are embracing these businesses and the idea of reducing food waste. 

Izzy: It’s something that virtually any organisation that involves food should be thinking about, and certainly, the biggest retailers – supermarkets like Tesco, Asda etc – have really managed to reduce the food going to waste. There’s still surplus at other points in the food supply chain though. This is something we discussed with Ali Gourley from FareShare, the UK’s biggest surplus food redistribution charity. 

Ali: We’re effectively like the wholesaler to the community sector. So we kind of bring the scale of the food industry and bring the efficiencies that you find in that to local charities who are then really sort of embedded in their communities. 

So retailers are getting better at reducing food waste that occurs in their footprint. And that has been historically the food that we as a sector have relied on. And that’s diminishing. So the imperative is for us to try and seek food from further back in the supply chain—so from manufacturers and farms. And that’s actually where the majority of the surplus is. 

So it’s but it’s more challenging to get that surplus, right? Because, you know, if it’s a supermarket, it’s already packaged or if it’s a distribution centre, you know, it’s in it’s in a box. It’s a very easy logistical thing to do to go and get that food. Whereas if it’s in a farm, it’s harder because, you know, it’s loose carrots. You need to take more steps to get that food into a position where charities can use it. And so that’s where my job comes in, in that I’m basically FareShare’s lobbyist. And I talk to government about how the government can help us in that effort.  

So we’ve spent the last four years campaigning for funding that was previously cut to be reinstated specifically for our farm level work. So it’s basically money that enables farmers to cover the cost of redistributing their surplus. So it’s often labour costs, packaging costs and transport costs.  

And the government announced or the last government announced it and then this government have also announced it. So 15 million for the sector, which is which is a really positive first step. 

Izzy: I find this really interesting. I don’t know about you but for me it would seem like a no brainer that farmers wouldn’t want to waste the food they had grown, I mean they’ve basically worked so hard doing that. I guess there is a point at which it is more expensive to try and actually do something with it, rather than to just throw it away. Corin explained this point really clearly: 

Corin: Food doesn’t go to waste because it’s moldy or it’s bad or it’s going to make someone sick. Food doesn’t go to waste when it’s getting to the end of its useful life, and there’s only a day left on it. When you start looking at the whole of our food chain, food goes to waste for a huge range of reasons. And what it boils down to is food goes to waste when it’s cheaper to dump it than it is to keep it in the system. When normally talking about financial and logistical issues that cause businesses to make decisions about what they’re going to keep and what isn’t worth it. 

Brad: It’s so frustrating that wasting food can be a saving for some people, and yet there are so many organisations that could benefit from lower cost food if it could just get to them. Here’s Fiona from CropDrop again, talking about the impact that rescuing food can have – both on growers and those that receive the produce. 

Fiona: if you put yourself in the shoes of someone who grows their own produce on an allotment you know they put so much time and love into growing these carefully selected seeds planted them you know brought them on then if you hand them over and never hear what happened to them. You’re not going to do it as much as if you hand them to your neighbour and say, “Oh, those beans, those beans are absolutely delicious.” Or, “I really enjoyed that courgette.” And you have a conversation. 

If there was more from the food projects in terms of feeding back what has happened or sharing recipes maybe or you know getting a conversation connection in some way building the connection a bit better I think it would work better but the other thing I guess from the point of view of  feeding into some of this this partnership group that we work with is that actually the amount of surplus from an allotment isn’t enough to help say run a Bath city centre food pantry I mean it’s not it’s not enough. So following on from that we’ve got an ecological farm that started up in Bath on the hills side on the west side of Bath and getting them to quote for the amount of vegetables that the affordable food pantry in the city centre would need in a whole year and then looking at what the difference is what they already pay out because they buy in from a supermarket to make up the difference and whether we could crowdfund that or how we could set that up you know how how we can make it locally grown food that is you know all grown according to lots of really good sustainable sensible principles is actually then being enjoyed by people who are finding food supply quite difficult or challenging temporarily hopefully. 

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Izzy: Is all this whetting your appetite for some local food waste-busting climate action of your own? There is loads of useful information about this topic on Carbon Copy’s website. And if your tastes are a little different, why not sample another one of our 25 Big Local Actions! The links are in the show notes; but first, let’s finish the episode! 

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Brad: So, these are four quite different organisations all tackling food waste in different ways. We asked all of our guests what people can do if they want to get involved, and what will help to make a difference. First, here’s Kate from Fooditude, speaking about how businesses can reduce food waste from catering: 

Kate: I think, I think the first thing is just understanding it, just measure everything. Cause you can’t, I think one of the hardest things is setting up a system to be able to measure and track everything. Even with we’re still going through that process. And I think then after that, it’s easier to spot and make changes. You can’t just go in blindly to make these changes. Like you really need to understand the situation. So I’d say first is create a basis of understanding it fully. There’s so many different companies that can provide that technology to help you as well. If you don’t have that, those resources internally. 

There is a cost benefit saving from this. If we are more efficient at cooking the food we need to cook, then we don’t need to buy the ingredients that we’re then going to be, you know, throwing in the bin once it’s been made. 

My main focus is getting all clients to a certain point. After that, I’d say it’s a lot of engagement with clients to try and understand the severity of it and to try and really ask them to be more conscious of what they’re ordering and why they’re ordering it. You know, don’t order a platter of sandwiches after lunch, because it’s not going to get consumed. So I think a lot of it is, is our work. And then a lot of it is working with them just to build up that relationship and yeah, approach it gently, but in a serious manner. 

Izzy: That engagement piece is really important, and is something that Corin definitely mentioned as well, when she told us about an exciting new programme that businesses in Greater Manchester can be part of: 

Corin: By the time this episode airs we will have launched a new corporate sponsorship scheme called Menu for Change. So because Open Kitchen is a food waste organisation. We have always advised on customers, quite honestly, when we think they are over catering, so we’ll, you know, good corporates will get in touch and they’re go, we got this all day conference going on and we want pastries on arrival that a mid-morning break with refreshments and cakes. Then we want variety at lunch and then cakes in the afternoon. And a lot of the time you can go through all of that and just say, you know, you don’t need to provide, you’ve got 150 people coming. You don’t need 150 portions of cake. 50% of these people are going to be on a diet. Some of them won’t have a sweet tooth. So you know, none of these people are going to starve if you don’t feed them. 

They’re fine. So we will advise our customers, quite honestly, about where you can reduce catering, either, you know, remove an element completely or reduce the amount of various elements to make sure you’re not over catering. And what we wanted to do with that was offer some options. So a menu of ways that, customers could support some real progressive community action so that the main element of Menu for Change is we will advise you on where you can reduce catering to reduce waste and hold a more sustainable event. 

And what we would like you to do if we give you that advice is to donate that money to our community fund, which is called Menu for Change. And the Menu for Change pot is going, is being used for two different outcomes. One of them is better food for our communities now, so that funding will allow us to buy and deliver, more nutritious, healthier and more sustainable products to our community food providers. Sometimes that’s about fresher ingredients, more more veg, more fruit. Sometimes it’s about culturally appropriate products for projects that are supporting Afro-Caribbean populations or South Asian communities. Sometimes it’s about things that don’t go to waste. Baby milk and baby formula have a huge profit margin on them. Things like that don’t go to waste, they don’t slip through the net. 

So, you know, there’s there’s certain specific products there that are difficult to get hold of. So better products, better nutrient and better health for our communities now is one of the ways that when you go into other thing that we’re doing is raising funds for the Greater Manchester Green Spaces Fund. So that’s a programme that was set up by Mayor Andy Burnham. And it’s about funding the development, support and skills to get disused and underused pieces of land into the hands of communities and train them and support them to be shared food growing sites. And that, for me, is really exciting because that’s a solution that is long term, secure access to hyper local, hyper nutritious, hyper sustainable food and it’s communities actually being able to deter them in their own food environment. 

Brad: Sounds like such an exciting programme, and it’s one that could definitely be rolled out in other places as well, with the right buy-in from the local authority. 

Izzy: Yeah definitely, and I can see that for businesses it’s a pretty easy choice, doesn’t really cost them anything, great from a CSR perspective and helps to tackle food waste; so meeting some of those important environmental objectives as well. 

Brad: What about the less businessy people in the audience, how can they take big local action on food waste? 

Izzy: I’m glad you asked… here’s Ali from FareShare and Fiona from CropDrop with some thoughts: 

Ali: We’re always looking for more food and more money and more volunteers. And if you can provide any one of those things, please, please visit our website fareshare.org.uk. We’re a big logistics operation. So a lot of the volunteering roles are like driving forklift trucks and warehouse stuff and going out in the vans. And so it’s a really good community to be a part of. So yeah, always looking for volunteers. And if you donate, it helps us get food from A to B and helps people. And yeah, if you’re a food business and you’re interested in reducing your environmental footprint and also doing things that benefit wider society, then we’d love to chat. There’s a great community around it. And we’ve got, you know, 18 organisations, but they run like 30 warehouses, 30 plus. So there’s probably a warehouse within driving distance or within bus distance, or whatever of you. So please get involved. 

Fiona: Along the way I’ve been involved with quite a few projects that connect people up but the benefits of volunteering I feel is very, I mean it’s talked about a lot by people in the volunteering community but if you go to any I don’t know wealth management seminars, retirement advice places it’s not often that people talk about volunteering and all the benefits it brings so I get that was a big motivator for me. I think that you feel really good if you’re helping other people and being kind and all that kind of stuff as long as you listen to them not just think you know what they are, you’re not walking in their shoes obviously. 

Izzy: Love that! Volunteering and working on projects with other people is not just about altruism, it can be fun, it can bring you joy! 

Brad: Yeah I definitely reckon think I could find joy in driving a forklift truck. 

Izzy: Yep I can definitely see that appealing to a few people! It’s great to hear about so many different ways to make a difference with this one. Shall we talk about what we’ve learnt? 

Brad: OK, so I have learned that food waste is a BIG problem, let’s have that stat again… 

Izzy: If food waste was a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after the US and China. 

Brad: That’s the one, pretty shocking stuff. 

Izzy: Yes absolutely, but for some more positive learning, I learnt that there are fantastic organisations like FareShare and CropDrop that are rescuing food and making sure it gets into the hands (and mouths, I guess!) of people who need it. 

Brad: Yes and we learnt how changes to the way supermarkets and other retailers are operating mean that food is now being sourced from other parts of the supply chain. 

Izzy: Absolutely. We also heard some useful tips from Fooditude and Open Kitchen about how businesses can think differently about food and reduce the impact of their catering so less edible food goes to waste. 

Brad: Yeah and we heard about how diverting funds from unnecessary catering is helping to support communities in Greater Manchester through the brilliant Menu for Change programme. 

Izzy: Yes, love that, we need more innovative solutions like that across the UK! 

Brad: Well, if you feel inspired to take action or to find out about getting involved with an existing project then please check out the show notes for all the links and information you need. We’d also love to hear your feedback and food waste tips – If you’re listening on Spotify or Apple then you can leave us a review or a comment – or you can email us, [email protected]. Thats dot E C O. 

Izzy: You’ve been listening to Do Something Bigger, from the Carbon Copy Podcast. It was written and presented by me, Isabelle Sparrow. 

Brad: And me, Bradley Ingham. 

Izzy: Brad also produced and edited this episode. Huge thanks to our guests, Fiona Bell from CropDrop, Ali Gourley from FareShare, Kate Page from Fooditude and Corin Bell from Open Kitchen. Our next episode is called Create Space for Nature, when we are re-joined by Kathryn Machin from WWF, as well as Kathy Barclay from Greening Maindee and Tayshan Hayden-Smith from Grow to Know. We hope you’ll join us then! Thanks for listening, goodbye!