A wasted opportunity- Lack of ambition in the EU’s first-ever legally binding food waste targets

It finally happened! After years of discussions and difficult negotiations, the EU has agreed to legally binding food waste reduction targets – a world first! This will legally require millions of tonnes of food waste to be reduced by 2030 in the 27 EU member states. 

And also for us at Feedback, it is a big moment. Founded as an organisation committed to stopping food waste and saving precious food together with communities, we have been fighting for this for 12 years!  

What was agreed? 

• TARGETS: As – unfortunately – expected, the Council of the EU and the EU Parliament agreed to stick to the same low targets as proposed by the European Commission in the first place: a (very low) 10% reduction in processing and manufacturing food waste by 2030 compared to 2021-2023; and a 30% reduction per capita of food waste from households, retailers, and food services compared to 2021-2023. Primary production is excluded from the targets completely. At the same time, the EU is supposed to be committed to meeting Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 to halve food waste by 2030. In other words: with the agreed very disappointing targets, the EU is effectively planning to fail! 

• EDIBLE or INEDIBLE food waste? The agreed legally binding targets to reduce EU Member State food waste will cover both the edible and inedible parts of wasted food. As part of the negotiations, EU Member States pushed for a separate approach, focusing targets solely on the edible fraction. With data currently unavailable on the distinction between edible and inedible food waste, this would have delayed targets – and limiting targets to inedible waste would have reduced the ambition of targets. Moreover, it is possible to reduce inedible food waste through prevention of overproduction and overconsumption. We therefore opposed a target narrowly focused on edible food waste only. In the end, the respective proposal was removed from the final deal – a success! 

• DONATIONS: Towards the end of the negotiations, suddenly a proposal to introduce mandatory donations of unsold food to food banks got on the table. As this would have actively undermined the cause for designing food waste and food poverty out of the system – as our Senior Policy and Campaigns Manager Martin Bowman has explained in this article -, we strongly opposed such a clause, and succeeded.  

• REVIEW CLAUSE: The co-legislators agreed to let the EU Commission review – by the end of 2027 – the targets to be reached by 2030, and, if appropriate, to modify and/or extend them to other stages of the food supply chain. Also by the end of 2027, the deal includes an assessment of the extent and causes of food waste and losses in primary production and possible measures against it. A fundamental problem thereby remains: the vast majority of primary production food waste is currently excluded from measurement, so there is no baseline data available for most primary production sector yet. Lastly, the EU Commission also got the possibility to potentially propose new legally binding targets for 2035. 

Further context: 

The path towards yesterday’s announcement – after almost 8 hours of negotiations, till 2:45 in the morning – has been rocky: 

• When the Waste Framework Directive was revised in 2018, the Council of the EU successfully delayed the reporting of food waste data by Member States. The same happened to the date when the Commission was meant to propose binding targets. As a result, the EU Commission only presented their proposal in 2023. With negotiations ongoing until now, the beginning of 2025, EU countries had less and less time to act until 2030, further limiting their willingness to be more ambitious. 

• The EU Commission offered almost no civil society consultation when developing the targets in the first place. In their limited consultation, there was no chance to comment on what level targets should be set at. Their justification for setting such low targets for the manufacturing & processing sector was weak – and seemed to be based on industry pressure. 

• The European Parliament elections in 2024 meant a shift to the right and emboldened the European People’s Party (EPP) to move away from their previous commitment to higher targets. Together with an unambitious lead negotiator (’rapporteur’) from the Eurosceptic ‘European Conservatives and Reformists’, this further weakened the European Parliament’s ability to push for higher targets. 

To sum up: 

Since 2030 is now only 5 years away, the 30% targets for households, retail and catering sectors will still be stretching for many Member States. It will therefore be essential for EU countries to rapidly develop action plans to unlock faster progress, drawing on regulations beyond just voluntary business measures. More ambitious countries should see these binding targets merely as a floor to their ambition and still voluntarily aim to halve food waste in all sectors by 2030. Here, we especially want to highlight countries such as the Netherlands, Romania, and Austria who also stated their higher ambition in our EU food waste survey last year. Looking forward, it is essential for the EU to extend measurement to cover food unharvested on farms and include primary production in binding reduction targets, as otherwise food waste risks being pushed onto farmers. 

Luckily, we were, and we are not alone in this. As part of the Prevent Waste Coalition on food waste, together with EEB, ZeroWaste Europe, SAFE, as well as TooGoodToGo, in the past years we raised pressure on policy-makers and fought hard for more ambitious targets – be it through exchanges with EU Member States, political groups in the EU Parliament, as well as the EU Commission. With several policy briefings and statements supported by experts and organisations from all over Europe and beyond, we not only made some noise, but also contributed critical evidence for an informed debate. Thank you to all our partners, who made this possible!  

Our fight to halve food waste until 2030, from farm to fork, continues!