[Chicago, IL, March 31, 2025] — Unsold food rates have decreased by 30%—the largest reduction ever recorded—since 2019 among food retailers on the West Coast, according to a new report from the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment (PCFWC), the West Coast’s public-private partnership focused on reducing food waste by 50% by 2030, and the U.S. Food Waste Pact (Pact), the national voluntary agreement for food businesses focused on reducing food waste through precompetitive collaboration and data sharing. The report also establishes national baselines for food waste generation at retail and corporate foodservice businesses, the first datasets of their kind, which will be used to track future progress.
Due to a lack of actionable data on food waste causes, destinations, and impacts that can be used by food businesses to develop sustainability goals and strategies, data measurement and reporting are key programmatic pillars of both the PCFWC and the Pact. By analyzing anonymized data from business signatories, PCFWC and Pact resource partners ReFED and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) determine the direction of intervention pilot projects and other precompetitive collaborative efforts. The 30% reduction in unsold food rates over five years on the West Coast indicates a continued decline, a testament to the importance of these critical data reporting efforts.
In addition to the fifth year of regional retail data from the PCFWC, ReFED and WWF are publishing the first year of U.S. Food Waste Pact national retail data, as well as the first year of national foodservice data. These two datasets establish national baselines of food waste generation for retail and corporate dining foodservice, and as the first datasets of their kind, they represent a major contribution to the field, allowing other businesses around the country to track how their own efforts measure up. The report identifies that national retail unsold food accounts for $42.3 billion dollars in lost sales and shines a light on food waste reduction as a critical business strategy for cost savings.
The joint annual report also details the results of four intervention projects completed in 2024, including one employee engagement pilot carried out at a Fresh Del Monte manufacturing plant in Oregon that resulted in the recovery of 53.2% of food that otherwise would have gone to waste after implementing a reduction idea that was submitted by an employee.
Because of the success of this project and others like it, ReFED and WWF have launched a set of open-source employee engagement resources, which are available for any food business to use whether or not they’re in the PCFWC or Pact. These include an Employee Engagement Toolkit—a portfolio of resources designed to empower any food business to pilot their own successful employee engagement intervention projects.
“This is a milestone year for both initiatives,” says Jackie Suggitt, vice president of business initiatives and community engagement at ReFED. “The PCFWC established back in 2019 that collaboration works in reducing food waste, and that impact will only grow as we scale this work nationally with the U.S. Food Waste Pact. This year’s data and resources marked a landmark for food waste reduction progress in the United States, and we look forward to keeping the momentum going into 2025 and beyond.”
The initiatives included a collective 22 food businesses that spanned the entire food supply chain in the year 2024 and will continue working with existing and new signatories in 2025. As business engagement grows, datasets become more robust, precompetitive conversation broadens, and intervention projects scale, food waste reduction is more feasible.
Learn more, including how to get involved, with the PCFWC at https://pacificcoastcollaborative.org/ and the Pact at https://usfoodwastepact.org/.
###
About the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment
The Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment (PCFWC) arose out of the Pacific Coast Collaborative in 2016 and is an innovative public-private partnership made up of West Coast jurisdictions, U.S. food industry leaders, and nonprofit resource partners that together seek to eliminate food waste in the region by 50% by 2030. Learn more about the initiative and its members at pacificcoastcollaborative.org/food-waste.
About the U.S. Food Waste Pact
The U.S. Food Waste Pact is a national voluntary agreement that uses the “Target, Measure, Act” framework to reduce food waste across the supply chain. The Pact works with waste-generating food businesses to collect and analyze data about food waste in their operations, share best practices through precompetitive working groups, and pilot and scale solutions through intervention projects. The Pact is an initiative between nonprofits ReFED and the World Wildlife Fund. For more information about the U.S. Food Waste Pact, visit http://usfoodwastepact.org/.
Media Contacts:
Nia D’Emilio, ReFED
Susan McCarthy, WWF