Food reduction specialist Winnow Solutions announced proposals today (9 July) to alleviate the public sector budget cuts announced in the ‘Summer Budget 2015’ by reducing the food wasted by state institutions.

According to Winnow CEO Marc Zornes, food waste costs the public £150 million a year, 50 per cent of which could be saved by ‘adopting a coordinated strategy to minimise food waste’.

He stated: “Food waste is costing the public purse as much as £150m per year. That’s the equivalent of funding over 6,000 teachers, 1,400 doctors or 750 fire engines. The savings opportunity is huge.”

Food waste campaigner Tristram Stuart added:

"Reducing food waste is a no-brainer and should be one of the highest priorities on the government's environmental agenda. Apart from the clear benefits to people and planet, there is also a huge opportunity for the public sector to realise a very real financial return by cutting food waste in schools, hospitals, and other institutions."

Winnow has detailed a number of proposals designed to help senior policy makers reduce food waste across education, healthcare and services. They include:

• ‘investing in training for kitchen teams to understand the true cost of food waste to their operations;
• investing in technology to accurately measure food waste and create meaningful benchmarks across sectors;
• empowering teams to take action within their own operations to reduce food waste and reward creativity; and
• continuing to support the excellent work WRAP and other partners are pursuing to share best practice and information to reduce food waste.’

Research into public sector food waste

According to the Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP), food waste over the entire hospitality and food service sector could cost £3 billion (bn) in 2016.

Indeed it states that the public sector currently spends over £2bn on food and catering services, with the UK government representing 5.5 per cent of total food service sector sales.

The British education system alone, the campaigning charity says, spends £250 million a year on food waste. A WRAP study found that primary and secondary schools throw away 55,408 tonnes and 29,974 tonnes of food respectively – over three quarters of which is ‘avoidable’.

Meanwhile, a study conducted by the Observer newspaper found that NHS hospitals have been found to be wasting anything from 82,000 to 400,000 meals a day. According to ‘The Campaign for Better Hospital Food’, run by food and farming campaigners Sustain, quality is a ‘key factor in the amount of waste being produced across the health service’.

Public sector taking note of food waste

All central government departments are now supporters of WRAP’s voluntary ‘Hospitality and Food Service Agreement’, which aims to help the sector to reduce waste and recycle more.

Additionally, Hospital caterers can now access a toolkit developed with the Hospital Caterers Association (HCA) to help them prevent food waste in hospitals.

In the education sector, Didcot Girl’s school claims to have cut food waste by 75 per cent by ensuring that their menu caters for the tastes of pupils, such as by preparing smaller quantities of a greater variety of vegetables.

Ultimately, Winnow stresses the need to effectively monitor food waste to drive reform in the public sector, ‘both from the perspective of understanding where food waste occurs throughout the production process as well as understanding the customer’s preferences’.

Find out more about Winnow Solutions.