It’s the third annual Food Waste Action Week, 6th – 12th March, and this year's theme is ‘Win. Don’t Bin’. The campaign is a week of action bringing the nation together to save time and money by making the food we already have go further. Every year 4.5 million tonnes of edible food is thrown away by UK households. Shockingly 25% of this wasted food is due to cooking, preparing or serving too much - this costs UK households £3.5 billion each year. That is why Love Food Hate Waste dedicates a whole week of action to shining light on how simple behaviours to reduce food waste can save money, time, and the planet.

In Good Company are here to support this campaign. So, here are a few simple ways to minimise excess food and use up your leftovers!

Write a shopping list

During our regular food shop, many of us will have landed in the position where we cannot remember if we are running low on basic ingredients. From essentials like bread, milk or pasta, we find ourselves buying extra ‘just in case’. Our shopping day then quickly transforms into a bin day as our perfectly edible old food gets thrown away to make space for the new, or sits there untouched until it goes off, simply because it wasn’t needed yet.       

A shopping list, whilst sometimes a tedious task, saves you time and money in the long run. The following few steps can help create a shopping list that works for you.

-         Update your list through the week. Whenever you run out of something or are running dangerously low, add it to the list. This will not only save you time when it comes to assembling the rest of your list, but helps avoid the risk of doubling up on produce.

-          Plan your shopping list around your meals for the week. We have all spent ages in supermarkets trying to figure out what we fancy for dinner and how much of each ingredient we need. Pre-planning your meals will help prevent impulse buying and save you time pondering in the shop.

-          Try to organise your list around the shop layout. Create groups of the same types of food whether it be fruit and veg or bakery to prevent you from having to wander forwards and backwards around the store. Pick your frozen food last so it will stay cooler for longer before you get home.

‘Use by’ vs ‘Best by’

Take a quick glance at your food packaging – chances are, there is probably a date on there reading either ‘Best before’ or ‘Use by’. But what do these mean? This section will help you make sense of these terms and help save your food from being thrown away whilst still perfectly edible.

‘Best before’ is about the quality of the food. After this date, the food may not be at its best, but it will still be safe to eat. Depending on how you store your food, it has the potential to be good enough to eat for a long time after this date. Use your sense to make a judgement.

‘Use by’ focuses on the safety of the food. You should not eat food past this date as you cannot always smell the bacteria that cause food to spoil. After this date, whilst the food may appear perfectly fine to eat, it could still lead to food poisoning. (This date, however, does not apply if your food has been in the freezer for a long period of time.)

Any ‘Display until’ or ‘Sell by’ date is only for the retailers – so you don’t need to worry about it.

Storing your food

Store your food in a way that keeps it fresher for longer. Ensure you put your food in the right place, e.g. fruit has a longer life when put in the fridge, and make the most of your freezer. This will give you more time to use and eat the food, saving it from being binned.

Surplus?

There are many ingenious solutions online for any and all your excess food, from meat scraps to avocados that are about to go off. For instance, you could create compost. Throw your banana peels, eggshells and apple cores into a compost bin to create rich fertile soil that can be used for houseplants or in the garden. There are also a million creative recipes online that put to use excess food – from delicious stocks using scraps and cut offs from vegetables to bird feeders that will invite nature to your doorstep.

Go to Love Food Hate Waste to keep up to date with more easy and exciting ways to reduce food waste.