Reducing food waste

In 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UNFAO) reported that world hunger continues to rise. Yet, according to the World Food Programme, the world produces enough food for everyone. Part of the answer to helping the one in nine people who suffer from hunger and malnutrition is to drastically reduce food loss and waste.

Along our value chain – primarily on farms, in our own operations and with consumers – Kellogg is reducing food loss and waste to ensure that food grown and made goes to feeding people, whenever possible. Doing so is one of the most important levers to solve the issue of food insecurity brought on by our growing population, climate vulnerability and malnutrition.

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 2030. This group, Champions 12.3, is named for U.N. SDG target 12.3 that 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.”

Impacting total waste

In our operations, we work to reduce total waste, ensuring re-use, recycling and other approaches to avoid sending waste to landfill. Our goal is to continue to reduce total waste by 15 percent (from a 2015 baseline) by the end of 2020. While we reduced our total waste by 11.3 percent in 2018, overall we have reduced total waste by 5.7 percent from the 2015 baseline.

In 2018, we teamed up with local brewery SE7EN BROTHERS to turn ‘waste’ Kellogg’s Corn Flakes into an IPA beer. ‘Throw Away IPA’ is made from waste Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, from the Manchester factory. These flakes are too big, small or overcooked - and therefore have not passed Kellogg’s strict quality control, and would inevitably go to animal feed. This is just one of the many innovative ways we are tackling food waste.