WRAP

WRAP’s Guardians of Grub campaign focuses on protecting profits and the planet to reduce the climate impact of wasted food for the hospitality sector. 

It takes natural resources, energy and time to produce our food. British pubs produce more than 200,000 tonnes of food waste every year, 75% of which could have been eaten. Besides the financial cost to businesses (avoidable food waste £0.14 per meal), every kilogram of wasted food requires the equivalent of over 3 kilograms of CO2e to produce.   

The production of food that ends up being wasted adds unnecessary GHGs to the atmosphere and contributes directly to global warming. Designed for the Hospitality and Food Service sector, the ‘Guardians of Grub’ campaign, from sustainability experts WRAP, is designed to help support pubs and other hospitality food businesses to take action.   

The latest addition to the campaign is an e-learning course ‘Becoming a Champion’ which has been developed by industry professionals to take food waste reduction skills to the next level. From the pilot, those organisations that completed either 4 or 8 week audits of their food waste, combined with other ‘Guardians of Grub’ learnings and insight, saw savings, on average of between 23 and 38% reduction in their food waste levels.  

Food waste weight per gramme is one of the most reliable metrics, particularly during the pilot which ran over the pandemic lockdowns and re-openings. Although anecdotal at this stage, increases in awareness, measuring and understanding of food waste across individual businesses was also reported. 

The following case studies show specific examples of the Guardians of Grub campaign in action: