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Food, Farming, Fisheries
Food Safety

Action & implementation sub-group

About the group

Action taken by the EU countries, regions and cities as well as farmers, industry, food banks and other redistribution organisations, consumer- and other NGOs is essential to prevent food waste all along the value chain and tackle varying situations across countries and regions. Through its dedicated sub-group on Action & implementation, the EU Platform on Food Losses and Food Waste aims to help the different sector organisations (public/private) and actors in the food supply chain in identifying and implementing effective food waste prevention initiatives and facilitate the uptake of best practices.

In the Platform's first mandate (2016-2021), the subgroup contributed to key deliverables such as the Platform's key recommendations for action in food waste prevention and the development of an evaluation framework allowing actors to quantify the economic, environmental and social impacts of food waste prevention actions. For the latter, the sub-group collaborated with the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission to collect food waste prevention actions from Platform members, in order to assess their effectiveness and efficiency. The sub-group developed a template for reporting on food waste prevention initiatives in order to collect information in a consistent manner and facilitate both information exchange and impact analysis. Based on relevant work conducted by JRC, a common evaluation framework for food waste prevention actions was developed.

The results of this pilot exercise are described in the Assessment of food waste prevention actions report (2019), below. The report highlights the data gaps, as well as the need to set clear objectives when designing an action, and provides a common evaluation framework allowing actors to quantify the economic, environmental and social impacts of food waste prevention. JRC has also developed a calculator for the environmental and economic impacts of food waste prevention actions.

The collaboration between the Action & implementation subgroup and JRC will continue from 2022, in order to refine the common evaluation framework.

During the second mandate, the Action & Implementation sub-group has been discussing the role of Voluntary agreements (VAs) on food loss and waste prevention in order to drive further action in this area and to progress faster towards the global SDG Target 12.3. Following discussions in the first meeting in June 2022, members agreed on creating a report with key learnings from members' implementation of VAs to help and inspire other members who would like to start a new VA or to improve an existent one. For this exercise, the sub-group focused on public-private partnerships, in line with the Platform's key recommendations for action and the mandate of the A & I sub-group.

More information about the background and tasks of this sub-group can be found in its Terms of reference:

Full list of the subgroup members can be consulted on this page (under section "Members")

Meetings 2024

14 October 2024 – On-line (Webex)

28 May 2024 – On-line (Webex)

Previous Meetings