Frozen food company the Iglo Group has launched a new campaign promoting frozen food as a means of tackling food waste.

The group, which owns the Birds Eye and Findus brands, has launched the Europe-wide ‘Forever Food Together’ (FFT) campaign to highlight the role freezing can have in preserving food, and to promote frozen food as a means of reducing food waste.

The campaign comes on the back of Iglo Group research that found that up to 77 per cent of people throw food away because they don’t have time to cook it before it spoils.

Indeed, research from the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP) has found that buying too much food and a ‘lack of clarity’ around storage and labelling are two of the most common reasons given for food wastage, which costs the average UK family (with children) around £60 a month.

Further to this, a report printed by the British Food Journal earlier this year found that if families ate more frozen food, they could reduce food waste by around 50 per cent, and save £250 a year.

Forever Food Together details

As such, the Iglo Group is urging consumers to take a range of actions, such as buying one meal and freezing one, and making one of their meals in the week frozen, to reduce the amount of fresh food that is going to waste.

The campaign has three goals:

• to ‘help educate consumers across Europe about the unique advantages of freezing and frozen food, and how it helps to tackle the food waste issue’:
• to have, by 2020, all of the group’s product innovation ‘help consumers make healthier meal choices’; and
• to ensure, by 2020, that all of the group’s food products will be responsibly sourced and prepared’.

The Iglo Group has also branded its Birds Eye range with a ‘Green Captain’ icon (pictured, right) to communicate the role of freezing in reducing food waste and highlight the company’s Forever Food Together sustainability commitments.

Campaign launch

Launching the campaign at the Shard in London this morning (14 October), the group brought together a panel of UK and European policy ‘experts’ to discuss whether behavioural change or targets are the best way to reduce food waste.

The panel included: Baroness Scott of Needham Market; Dr Liz Goodwin, CEO of WRAP; Dr Wayne Martindale, Research Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University (author of the British Food Journal report); and Lawrence Hene, Director of Marketing and Grocery Retail at Ocado.

As part of this panel debate, the Iglo Group asked a number of policy questions and made suggestions, including:

1. As fruit and vegetables are one of the most wasted food types, should consumers be asked to make at least one of their ‘five a day’ frozen?
2. Should ‘buy one get one free’ promotions be replaced with ‘buy one, freeze one’ sales promotions?
3. Asking retailers and manufacturers to select a group of ‘high-volume, iconic products’ to progress towards 100 per cent resource utilisation ‘from source to plate’ in a bid to help reach the European Commission’s target of cutting food waste throughout the supply chain by 30 per cent by the year 2025; and
4. Calling on EU member states to undertake more research into understanding:

• the ability of each food supply chain to maximise its resources based on the method of food preservation;
• how the greater use of freezing and frozen food in the household can further reduce food waste;
• and a ‘more consistent’ methodology in measuring food waste.

Freezing food ‘has the potential to play a key role in the fight against food waste’

Speaking at the launch this morning, the Chief Executive of the Iglo Group, Elio Leoni Sceti, said: “Currently one third of all food produced globally is lost or wasted. Food waste has become more than just a practical consideration in terms of feeding a growing population. It has become a moral one.

“Freezing food, as a means of preservation, has the potential to play a key role in the fight against food waste. As the leaders in frozen food across Europe, we have relationships all the way up the supply chain and the consumer trust and loyalty that allows us to take a leadership role and encourage people to use freezing and their freezers to waste less food.”

Peter Hajipieris, Director for Corporate Social Responsibility, added: “Today’s launch of the Green Captain symbolises a new era in Iglo Group's sustainability journey, where we don’t just pledge to embody and embed the very best sustainable practices – we pledge to lead. This is a key promise in Forever Food Together.”

The Iglo Group has also signed up to the Institute of Grocery Distribution’s (IGD) ‘Working on Waste’ campaign, which aims to disseminate the anti food waste message to employees, ‘driving awareness and engagement to take learnings beyond the workplace into households’.

Working in collaboration with WRAP, the campaign is set to reach around 650,000 employees working in the industry across 107 fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) organisations and associated companies during the month of October.

Find out more about Forever Food Together and the Working on Waste campaigns.