10-07-2025
Why supermarkets are being urged to change how they sell potatoes
Selling vegetables such as baking potatoes and apples in unwanted plastic multipacks is wasting enough food to fill Wembley Stadium around eight times over every year.
This means Britons are spending £17bn on food that is thrown away (an average of £1,000 a year for a typical household).
The scale of waste has lead to calls for wholesale changes in food packaging.
According to a new report by campaign group WRAP, food waste slightly declined between 2021 and 2022 – but that was mainly due to temporary factors such as the end of COVID restrictions leading to more people eating out, and the cost of living crisis causing food prices to spike.
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Nonetheless, 4.4 million tonnes of edible food was wasted, equivalent to 470,000 bin lorries or 3,500 Olympic sized swimming pools.
And WRAP says that changing the way supermarkets sell food could make an enormous difference to how much we throw away.
"Selling items loose could save 100,000 tonnes of fruit and avoid 13,000 tonnes of single use plastic film," Estelle Herszenhorn, head of food system transformation at WRAP, said. 'Around 40% of wasted food in the home is because it isn't used in time, so enabling people to buy closer to their needs and equipping them with good storage information is key.
'Changes like reviewing dairy products like milk and yogurt to change from use by to best before dates – wherever possible – and offering smaller format bread at comparable prices could all help us avoid common food waste at home.'
In 2022, local authorities spent around £500m disposing of food waste that was not properly placed in special food bins, but instead thrown away in normal black bins.
As a result, 83% of food waste in our rubbish bins was incinerated or sent to landfill.
WRAP has called for specific items that are commonly sold in multipacks to be phased out and sold loose instead.
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Plastic wrapping and trays (which contain multiple vegetables, rather than one) mean that people over-buy food such as potatoes, which then go to waste.
Bananas, apples, broccoli and cucumbers are also among five of the most commonly wasted foods, according to WRAP.
Every day in the UK, households waste 1,300 tonnes of potatoes, which is equivalent to 8.2 million potatoes, along with 130 tonnes of bananas (equivalent to 1.1 million bananas) and 90 tonnes of apples (equivalent to 1.3 million apples).
If sold loose, these could prevent 100,000 tonnes of food waste in the UK and remove 10,300 tonnes of plastic packaging.
Supermarkets have taken steps to reduce plastic packaging, including on fruit and vegetables, but argue that plastic packaging helps to preserve food and prevent waste in-store.
Using film to wrap a cucumber extends its life in-store from three days to 14 days, and packaging grapes in plastic boxes cuts in-store wastage by 20%.
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"Packaging plays an important role, acting as a safety barrier against contamination and increasing the shelf life of many food products, reducing food waste," Naomi Brandon-Bravo, sustainability adviser at the British Retail Consortium, told Yahoo News.
"Retailers are committed to reducing unnecessary and single-use plastic packaging, and have worked together across the UK to eliminate problem plastics and increase recycling, as demonstrated in the Plastics Pact, an initiative endorsed by the four UK governments."
Pact members aim to eliminate problem plastics and also reduce the total amount of plastic packaging on shelves.
