Australian Food Pact: Impact Report 2024
Published by End Food Waste Australia for the Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. Rawtec has provided the annual data validation, analysis and reporting for the Australian Food Pact since 2022. February 2025.
Summary published
The Australian Food Pact is a voluntary agreement between food businesses to cut waste across the supply chain, modelled on the UK’s Courtauld Commitment. As at December 2024 it had 48 organisations involved, 17 of them as signatories.
Signatories report their own food waste data each year. Rawtec validates and analyses it, and this report is the three-year picture from the 2022 baseline.
Food waste across the signatory group fell 13% while the volume of food they handled rose 19%.
Reduction in food waste, 2022 to 2024
Meals donated to food rescue over three years
CO2 equivalent saved
Collective cost saving
What three years of data shows
Less waste while handling more food
Food waste fell by 16,000 tonnes, a 13% decrease, at the same time as total food handled rose 19% from 9.83 to 11.67 million tonnes. That combination is the efficiency gain.
Most unsold food now gets repurposed
982,000 tonnes of food was repurposed in 2024, which is 76% of food not sold, up from 73% in 2022. Total food not sold fell 9,000 tonnes while absolute repurposed volume rose 6,000.
Landfill share more than halved
Food waste going to landfill fell 59%. As a share of destinations it dropped from 6.8% to 3.2%, while charity redistribution rose from 6.3% to 8.8%. Every signatory was managing waste according to the food hierarchy by 2024, up from 67% in 2022.
The governance change is as big as the tonnage change
78% of signatories now have executive responsibility for food waste reduction, up from 44%. 89% provide employee training, up from 67%. And 69% report their measurement itself has become more accurate, which matters when the data is self-reported.
Expired stock is the problem getting worse
Expired product accounted for 44% of food waste in 2024, up from 35% in 2022. Meanwhile the share of food waste that was still edible fell from 92% to 75%. Waste is going down overall, but the remaining waste is increasingly stock that timed out.
What it is worth
$57 million in collective savings from the 16,000 tonne reduction, plus $2 million in avoided landfill levy. The report uses an average disposal cost of $3,600 a tonne. For context it cites food waste costing the Australian economy $36.6 billion a year across 7.6 million tonnes.
How much weight to put on it
Signatories report their own figures. Rawtec validates and analyses them, but there is no independent audit of the underlying counts.
The core signatory group is 17 organisations. Findings should not be read as representative of the whole Australian food sector, though by 2025 the addition of ALDI took supermarket sector representation to 83%.
Greenhouse savings use published high-level conversion factors rather than a detailed methodology.
Year-on-year comparisons only include signatories who reported across all three years, so the trend is a like-for-like subset rather than the full group.
Related reports
Other food waste and measurement work.
The full impact report is published by End Food Waste Australia.
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