New guidance expanding the reach of the UK’s Food Waste Reduction Roadmap has been published to identify food waste and its causes. The scale of the issue was highlighted in research which found around 19% of all lettuces went unharvested in 2015, with 38,000t lost across the sector – worth £7m.

This varied significantly between growers, with a range from 7% to 47% of production ending up as waste.

Across the sector, around 3.6m tonnes of food either goes to waste on farm each year, or is surplus to requirement. That’s a potential £1.2bn loss to the sector – equivalent to seven per cent of the total food harvest.

Waste data

The roadmap is hoped to better support growers to better measure and share their waste data to help identify opportunities, and offers huge potential to improve productivity.

The resources were developed following calls from agricultural businesses for practical guidance tailored to the needs of growers with the guidance free to download from the food waste reduction website.