Food Waste

This weekend, the Commission will host the second meeting of the European Citizens' Panel on food waste. This meeting will take place virtually and will allow citizens to further discuss and shape their ideas on how to step up action to reduce food waste in the EU. The aim of the panel is to develop recommendations that will feed into the Commission's work on food waste and serve as a guide to help Member States in achieving future EU-wide food waste reduction targets (new legislative proposal to be adopted by the Commission by June 2023). The recommendations will be finalised in the third and final session of this European Citizens’ Panel, to be held in Brussels from the 10-12 February, and will be submitted to the Commission as a report.

This is the first of a new generation of Citizens' Panels launched as a follow-up to the Conference on the Future of Europe, embedding participatory and deliberative practices in the European Commission's policy-making process on certain key policy areas.

The panel is composed of 150 randomly selected citizens. They are representative of the EU's diversity in terms of geography (national and urban/rural origin), gender, age, socio-economic background and level of education. One third of the participants are young people under the age of 26.

The plenary panel discussions can be followed via webstreaming. A summary of the first session can be found here.