Hospitality & Food Service: WRAP's work

WRAP, working with all four UK Governments, has identified that the Hospitality & Food Service sector is in a strong position to make a considerable contribution to reducing food and associated packaging waste. This will save money and reduce environmental impacts.

Scale of the sector*

There are almost 260,000 outlets in the UK ranging from cafés to hotels and hospitals.
2011 sales of food and drink totalled £42,785 million and it is estimated that 8,008 million meals were served.

For more data see Horizon's UK Foodservice in 2012

WRAP's research

Restaurants, hotels, pubs and quick service restaurants (QSRs) serve a large number of individual consumers. WRAP research estimates that in 2009 UK pubs, restaurants, take-aways and hotels produced around 3.4 million tonnes of waste. Of this, 1.5 million tonnes of this was sent to landfill and has an associated carbon impact of around 4 million tonnes of CO₂e. WRAP estimates the costs associated with avoidable food waste to be more than £720 million.

Contract catering principally covers contract caterers servicing clients, e.g. local authorities, NHS, MOD and the prison service, as well as staff canteens in offices and factories. WRAP is carrying out research in 2012 to estimate the amount of waste produced by business and industry, schools, hospitals and government services suchas prisons and the MOD across the UK. The outputs from this research will be published later this year.

Forthcoming projects

Project summary: Food waste prevention out of home (consumer research) - research into the barriers to food and drink waste in the home, motivations to prevent food waste, and related attitudes and behaviours

Project summary: Product & Packaging Mapping in the Hospitality and Food Service sector - research into opportunities for optimisation of packaging without increasing food and drink waste.

Project summary: research into the effective engagement of Tourism SMEs within the Hospitality and Food Service sector - exploring opportunities for understanding the support needed for Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) within tourism in Scotland and Wales.

Project summary: the nature and scale of waste generated by the Hospitality and Food Service sector: completing the evidence base - research to better understand the amount and type of waste arising from schools, further and higher education, business and industry, prisons and military sites, hospitals and care homes. This study with also include the leisure and transport subsectors.

Project summary: Reducing waste in the UK Hospitality and Food Service supply chain: the employee perspective - this project aims to unlock the potential of employees across the sector to drive change.