Courtauld Commitment Annual Review 2016-17: setting the foundations for change

Overview

WRAP has just released the ‘Courtauld Commitment Annual Review 2016-17’. The Review demonstrates how Courtauld 2025 builds on the success of previous food and drink sector voluntary agreements in helping identify areas of the supply chain where resource efficiency is an issue, and then develops and shares best practice to help increase productivity and eliminate waste:

• WRAP worked with businesses and sector bodies to create and deliver the ‘Your Business is Food; don’t throw it away’ campaign for the hospitality and food service sector. Free tools and resources now help businesses to track, cost and act on food waste.
• ‘Your Workplace Without Waste’ is Courtauld Commitment 2025’s employee engagement programme which helps food and drink businesses engage employees in finding ways to cut waste, and identify surpluses that can be redistributed.
• Courtauld 2025’s ‘Raw Materials Risks and Opportunities Screening Tool’ helps businesses improve long-term sustainability in their supply chains by highlighting potential risks, and offering advice to mitigate against these.
• Using unavoidable food waste and surpluses as new revenue streams is the focus of the ‘Waste Valorisation’ programme. WRAP’s mapping tool can trace wastes and by-products generated through the manufacturing process, allowing Courtauld Commitment 2025 signatories from the dairy, fresh produce, bakery and beverage sectors to identify key wastes and by-products.
• The first year of Courtauld 2025 saw signatories agree to double the amount of surplus food redistributed for human consumption by 2020. This means an additional 60 million meals, worth an estimated £60 million, could feed people in need each year.
• WRAP has also worked with the Food Standards Agency and Defra Labelling to update and expand labelling best practice guidance for retailers and manufacturers, to help reduce waste and increase redistribution.
• The ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ campaign delivered big initiatives in 2016, including a partnership with 20th Century Fox for the DVD launch of Ice Age 5: Collision Course. The campaign shared messages about freezer storage.
• In 2016, ‘Love Food Hate Waste’ supported Asda’s Community Life Champions on a campaign to help customers save food from being wasted by making the most of their freezer. Called ‘Easy Freezy’, activities took place in 350 stores across the UK.

Looking forward, the Courtauld 2025 Review highlights key actions to be completed in the coming months and years:

• The focus remains on reducing the environmental impact of the UK’s food in the home, while helping organisations and businesses improve their productivity through greater resource efficiency across the supply chain.
• With eight of the top ten countries from which the UK imports its food drought-prone, water is becoming an increasingly unpredictable factor. A water ambition is being developed for Courtauld 2025 that includes a framework for increasing collective action in areas of water stress.
• We’re also enabling delivery signatories to report quantitatively to WRAP on their food and drink waste, so that we can track progress and help focus action. In 2019 we will report on progress at the first milestone point (end-2018). Further reporting milestone dates are scheduled for 2021 and end-2025.