Scoping consumer food waste: an evaluation framework of prevention interventions

Food waste is a global concern already identified to be addressed in the Sustainable Development Goals (12.3) and the EU policy agenda under the Circular Economy Action Plan and the Green Deal within the Farm to Fork Strategy. The EU has committed to halving food waste at the retail and consumer level following SDG 12.3, establishing legally binding reduction targets and enabling their reach through the setting of baseline measurement and uniform monitoring. Across the Member States, most food waste occurs at the consumer level. Therefore, reducing consumer food waste is critical for achieving future EU-level targets for food waste reduction. Consumer food waste (both in- and out-of-home) - whilst influenced by the food supply chain and food environment - is essentially a behavioural issue. The behavioural factors underlying consumers' decisions to discard food need to be uncovered, and consumer-focused interventions have to be adequately designed to deliver on the ambitious target reduction. To address the existing research gaps, the Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) established a multi-disciplinary forum of researchers and practitioners in the area of consumer food waste prevention under the pilot project called the European Consumer Food Waste Forum (ECFWF). The ECFWF will issue research- and evidence-based recommendations and develop tools to help reduce consumer food waste, aiming to produce a compendium of best practices and recommendations to facilitate the uptake of effective interventions. To this end, there was the need to 1) define the scope, i.e., the type of interventions, tools, best practices and recommendations to be explored, and 2) to develop an evaluation framework specifically tailored for consumer interventions. This has been done by 1) conducting several literature reviews on the state of the art of intervention evaluation and available frameworks, and on the main food drivers and levers of consumer food waste, 2) organising a virtual workshop, meetings and gathering written feedback on the discussed topics from ECFWF members. This report outlines the scope of the ECFWF and the evaluation framework for consumer food waste prevention interventions. The latter is complemented with a data protocol for the collection of information on interventions and some selected tools, best practices, and recommendations agreed under the scope of the ECFWF.