Circular Economy Collaboration & Co-Creation

General Mills, Nestlé, Walmart CEOs Lead Coalition to End Food Waste Worldwide

The Coalition of Action to End Food Waste aims to enact measures that benefit the environment and the global economy, and ensure more food makes it to stores and onto consumers’ tables.

Published 4 years ago | About a 3 minute read

Image: Joshua Hoehne/Unsplash

The Consumer Goods Forum (CGF) has launched a CEO-led Coalition of Action on Food Waste, comprised of 14 of the world’s largest retailers and manufacturers with the goal of halving per capita global food loss at the retailer and consumer levels.

Food waste remains a critical environmental, social and economic issue worldwide. A third of food produced is never eaten, which amounts to about 1.3 billion tonnes of food lost each year — which represents an economic cost to the global economy of US$940 billion. Food waste also adds 3.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere annually; so, if food waste were a country, its carbon footprint would be third only to China and the US.

New technologies and innovations continue to emerge that aim to curtail food waste throughout the value chain, but they remain piecemeal and have yet to be scaled enough to make a real dent.

This new Coalition, with its members’ global reach and influence, aims to finally move the needle. In 2015, CGF launched a resolution to mitigate the roughly 40 percent of food wasted globally by agreeing to halve food waste within the operations of its 400 retailer and manufacturer members by 2025, and to support wider UN Goals on the issue. This new Coalition will build off of those efforts, as well as those of Champions 12.3 — a long-time CGF partner and multi-stakeholder organisation working to reach UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 — and call for standardized date labelling.

The 14 initial members of the Coalition are Ahold Delhaize, Barilla, Bel Group, General Mills, Kellogg Company, Majid Al Futtaim, McCain Foods, Merck Animal Health, Metro AG, Migros Ticaret, Nestlé, Sainsbury, Tesco and Walmart.

Through their participation in the Coalition, members have committed to fulfill three Coalition commitments:

Report their food loss data by 2021.
Scale up Champions 12.3’s 10x20x30 Initiative — extending their collaboration beyond the Coalition to engage their suppliers and other stakeholders.
Address food loss at the post-harvest level, which is responsible for creating 30 percent of food waste, by engaging with stakeholders to develop effective food-loss prevention strategies.

The Coalition is also creating regional working groups to drive implementation at the local level, and to help engage key stakeholders in North America, Latin America, and China and Japan.

The Coalition is sponsored at the CGF Board level by Dave Lewis, Group Chief Executive of Tesco and Chair of Champions 12.3; and McCain President and CEO Max Koeune. The Coalition Steering Committee is co-chaired by Kellogg’s Francisco Cordero and Ahold Delhaize USA’s Brittni Furrow. CGF Managing Director Wai-Chan Chan has also become Champions 12.3’s latest “Champion.”

Learn more about the Coalition of Action on Food Waste here.