WRAP Food Loss and Waste Data Taxonomy

The Problem

WRAP's UK Food and Drink Pact (formerly the Courtauld Commitment 2030) asks the UK food industry to halve food waste by 2030, in line with UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3. It unites organisations across the whole supply chain, from primary production through manufacturing and retail to hospitality and the household.

Signatories, and the wider international network of food pacts, report their food loss and waste using locally divergent definitions, product groupings and destination categories. The same physical tonne of waste can be counted under different labels in different countries, different reporting tools and sometimes different parts of the same business.

Without a shared, coded classification system that data cannot be reliably aggregated or compared. Progress against a headline target then rests on numbers that were never commensurable in the first place, and the failure is silent: the totals still add up, they just do not mean what they appear to mean.

Why It Is Hard

The international Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard is a conceptual framework. It settles what should be counted and why, but it is not something a reporting tool can execute. Turning a conceptual standard into implementable, machine-readable data infrastructure means resolving the boundary cases the framework deliberately leaves open, doing so consistently across jurisdictions with different waste regimes, and keeping the result platform-agnostic so that no signatory is forced onto a particular system in order to report.

It also has to survive change. Classifications drift as products, processes and regulations move, so the structure needs version-controlled governance rather than a document that is correct on the day it is signed off.