Label better, less waste: Uncut fruit and vegetables

This updated guidance (Publication date November 2017, updated August 2023) helps retailer and supply chain businesses identify and implement actions that deliver the greatest reductions to help consumers reduce household food waste, by explaining and demonstrating which changes to fruit and vegetable products, packs, labels and the retail environment are most effective and impactful.

This guidance has been designed in collaboration with signatories of the Courtauld Commitment 2030 and members of The UK Plastics Pact to optimise savings in plastic packaging and food waste. The collaboration is also developing a Pathway to selling more uncut fresh produce loose (‘the Pathway’) to identify which fresh produce items will be sold loose and when.

Research published by WRAP in 2022 found that adopting these actions for the five items studied (apples, bananas, broccoli, cucumber and potatoes) alone could:

• Prevent 100,000 tonnes of household food waste each year.
• Amount to 10,300 tonnes of plastic packaging removed.
• This would deliver a combined emissions equivalent to 130,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.