This is the 11th in an annual series of updates providing an assessment of the world’s progress toward achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3, which aims to “by 2030, halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses." This publication seeks to inform decision-makers in government, business, academia, and civil society about recent advances and what remaining steps need to be addressed if the world is to achieve the target.
With just three years left, global progress on SDG Target 12.3 is too slow and uneven to reach a 50% cut by 2030. But the target has inspired solutions that are working. The job now is to scale them.
In 2015, when SDG 12.3 launched, very few governments or companies were measuring food loss and waste at all. Today, the issue sits firmly on the global agenda, and a growing number of countries and companies have already met the goal on their own.
Highlights from this year's progress report:
- Governments are putting teeth into policy. Binding food waste laws took effect in 2026 in Spain, Panama, California and New South Wales. Spain now requires every food business to have a food waste prevention plan, and Panama gives legal protection to organizations that donate edible food. South Africa's Western Cape will ban all organic waste from landfill starting in 2027. Thirty countries also addressed food loss and waste in their latest climate plans (NDCs).
- Companies that commit are delivering significant results. Ingka Group, Ajinomoto and Carrefour each cut food loss and waste by more than 50%. Tiger Brands, South Africa's largest food company, halved its operational food waste in five years and has seen a positive return on that investment. Now, 539 companies belong to a food waste pact, and more than 350 of them measure and report their data. New tools are speeding things up.
- AI is helping companies find and fix waste faster. In a two-week pilot, Nestlé cut edible food waste at one factory by 87% using Zest’s AI technology to pinpoint waste hot spots. Cargill's CarVe computer vision system, now running at three beef processing sites, has improved yield per cut by 3–5%, saving millions of dollars and thousands of pounds of beef. However, AI must be used with care and with awareness of the resource use, trust, and job impacts.