Imagine a precompetitive place where food businesses can come together to strategize and drive progress around food waste reduction. It exists, and it’s called the U.S. Food Waste Pact: a space where food businesses can collaborate to “Target, Measure, and Act” on food waste reduction.

Launched by co-leaders ReFED and World Wildlife Fund, the U.S. Food Waste Pact (the Pact) is a national voluntary agreement to help businesses accelerate progress toward their food waste reduction targets. For nearly two years, the Pact has worked with over 20 food businesses across the supply chain to collect and analyze data about food waste in their operations, share best practices through precompetitive working groups, and pilot and scale solutions through intervention projects.

To better understand the Pact’s work and wins, here are five things you need to know:

1. Pact signatories represent all corners of the supply chain.

Since the Pact launched at the end of 2023, 23 business signatories have signed on to participate in the initiative’s programming. The Pact has nine retail signatories, including Albertsons Companies, Kroger, and Walmart, and three manufacturing signatories, including Bob’s Red Mill, Del Monte Fresh Produce Company, and Lamb Weston. And since its inception, the Pact has branched out significantly in the foodservice sector. Three quick-service restaurants—Chick-fil-A, Starbucks, and Wawa—and two coalition signatories—Health Care Without Harm and the R&DE Stanford Food Institute—have joined, expanding the Pact’s reach into the broader foodservice sector. In 2025, Hilton joined the Pact as its first hospitality signatory, and FMI—The Food Industry Association joined as its first trade association. With such diverse representation, the Pact is gaining momentum as it works to scale its efforts into more areas of the food system and make food waste reduction more accessible and effective.

2. Pact signatories report data annually, creating publicly available industry benchmarks and the ability to track progress.

The U.S. Food Waste Pact builds on the success of the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment (PCFWC), a regional public-private partnership that is working to reduce food waste on the west coast by 50% by 2030. For five years, the PCFWC produced the first retail dataset in the country, which tracks progress in food waste reduction from regional grocery retailers. Over that five-year period, retailers reduced food waste by an unprecedented 30%.

The Pact is continuing this work by collecting, aggregating (and anonymizing), and analyzing data from signatories on a national scale. Pact retail signatories that participated in data collection last year represented over 50% of the retail segment in the U.S. In 2025, new benchmarks were set for the retail sector using signatory data, establishing a national best-in-class dataset. Additionally, the Pact established new benchmarks in foodservice, the first dataset of its kind in the U.S. A detailed report of these datapoints, benchmarks, and trends can be found in the most recent annual data report, Progress In Reducing Food Waste: A Data Report from the Pacific Coast Food Waste Commitment and the U.S. Food Waste Pact.

3. Pact signatories come together on a quarterly basis to discuss best practices and new ideas for food waste reduction.

A pillar of the Pact’s programming is its precompetitive convenings. The Pact hosts two different collaborative groups, which each meet virtually once per quarter with an opportunity to meet in person at the ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit. Working Groups are open to signatories across the supply chain, and they focus on four main subjects: Consumer Engagement & Environments, Food Recovery, Staff Training & Engagement, and Whole Chain. In these sessions, signatories discuss learnings from their own initiatives in these four categories, which can result in ideas for intervention projects: pilots that test and scale food waste solutions. Sector Summits are quarterly meetings where signatories that belong to the same sector meet and discuss their unique needs and challenges around food waste reduction. All meetings operate under Chatham House rules, which ensure confidentiality, and impact really begins in those quarterly conversations.

4. The Pact’s whole chain projects find out where waste is being generated across the supply chain.

One of the Pact’s main focus areas for intervention projects is whole chain pilots, which seek to identify waste hotspots along the supply chain of one commodity. These kinds of projects are key to understanding where to focus food waste reduction efforts across sectors, and to date, the Pact has completed four such projects with four additional projects currently active. Frozen potatoes were the focus of one of the completed whole chain projects, all of which include two phases. In the first phase, waste hotspots are identified from farm to retail, and in this particular example, it was determined that the most food waste occurred at the processing stage. The second phase of the project examines potential solutions. For frozen potatoes, it was determined that implementing all identified solutions would retain the equivalent of 16.8 million meals per year and save the processor more than $1M per year.

5. The Pact’s employee engagement projects have had staggering results that any business can replicate.

Another main focus area for intervention projects is employee engagement pilots, which engage frontline workers in food waste reduction efforts. This work began with the PCFWC in 2022, when Bob’s Red Mill reduced food waste on a manufacturing line by a huge 70% when they ran an employee engagement competition. After iterating on that pilot and repeating its success at Land O’Lakes and Fresh Del Monte manufacturing plants, the Pact developed the Employee Engagement Toolkit, an open-source resource that any food business can use to engage their employees and meet their food waste reduction goals.

Beyond manufacturing, the Pact has also run this kind of pilot in the foodservice sector, which was the initiative’s first national intervention project. Three Pact signatories collaborated to engage ten dining halls across the country in an employee engagement competition, resulting in over 120 food waste reduction ideas and ten piloted solutions.

As 2026 approaches, the Pact will continue to drive momentum for food waste reduction across the industry. ReFED and WWF hope to expand the initiative into new sectors and subsectors, develop more resources for food businesses, and lead efforts to test and scale food waste solutions.

Curious to learn how your business can become part of the U.S. Food Waste Pact? Reach out to us by using this form.