Food Waste Reduction

Reducing food loss and waste can be more beneficial than ever before as our world faces multiple crises. At a time when the world is experiencing high food prices and one in nine people globally face food insecurity¹, 30-40% of the food produced doesn’t get eaten.¹ Emissions from food loss and waste contributes to the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.¹

As a global food company, we can play a role in helping to eliminate food waste from our value chain and creating a positive impact for people and planet.

Our Commitment

As part of our Kellogg’s Better Days^® Promise goal to create better days for 3 billion people by the end of 2030, we aim to reduce food waste when making our food by 50% within our global Kellogg-owned manufacturing facilities by the end of 2030.

Our Approach

To achieve our goal, we are focused primarily on measuring food waste and loss in our facilities and implementing solutions to eliminate waste in our processes when making food. For example, we have modified equipment to enhance production efficiency for several foods, including Pringles®.

In 2016, Kellogg was one of the first companies to join a group of global leaders from government, business, research and farming communities committed to working together to meaningfully reduce food loss and waste by the end of 2030. This group, Champions 12.3, is named for United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (U.N. SDGs) target 12.3, which calls for “cutting in half per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer level and reducing food losses along production and supply chains (including post-harvest losses) by 2030.” Yet, our commitment goes further than the Champions 12.3 definition of food waste, as it includes organic materials captured under the 8 destination categories¹ to maximize our impact and make sure the food we use gets to people through our sales and donations.

Also, as part of our commitment to transparency, Kellogg was an early adopter of the World Resource Institute (WRI) Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard and was one of the first companies to report global food waste data by destination.

In 2022, we began revamping our waste commitments. As part of this process, we aim to sunset our organic waste commitment and install a food waste commitment. This new food waste commitment will be aligned with the food waste definition of the Food Loss and Waste protocol from World Resources Institute, and therefore will exclude animal feed material. This new commitment will be better aligned with the industry and other peer measurements.

We also contribute in other important ways:

Farming – Working with partners to reduce pre and postharvest loss on farms to ensure that more of the food that is grown is consumed. For example, in Mexico we partnered with the Mexico Food Bank Network to rescue fruits and vegetables from agricultural lands to provide people with fresh fruit and vegetables that were at risk of being lost but able to be consumed.
Reaching out to consumers – Standardizing our food date labels and educating consumers if food is safe to consume, as well as delivering tips and packaging innovation to help them reduce unnecessary food waste at home.
Sharing with communities – While it doesn’t contribute to our food waste metrics, we donate food to help feed people in need either due to natural disasters or chronic hunger in communities we support around the world.

We measure and report our food waste in conformance with the Food Loss and Waste (FLW) Protocol. This protocol allows an entity to choose the combination of materials and destinations it considers to be “food loss and waste.” Kellogg’s definition of “food loss and waste”, which we label “organic waste”, extends to all organic waste lost in our facilities. For more information, please visit our Kellogg’s Better Days® Promise Commitments and Methodology.

Our Progress
Since 2016, we’ve reduced our food waste by 42.4% across our Kellogg-owned manufacturing facilities.

^{[1] https://www.theconsumergoodsforum.com/blog/2022/07/24/how-stakeholders-can-reduce-food-loss-and-reap-the-benefits/

[2] Animal feed, bio-based materials/biochemical processing, co-digestion/anaerobic digestion, composting/aerobic processes, controlled combustion, land application, landfill, and wastewater treatment.}