ReFED is excited to announce an update to the Insights Engine, featuring a significant improvement in how we estimate household food waste. With this update, we have integrated newly available research that enables us to measure change in household waste over time. This builds on our commitment to deliver the most accurate, best-in-class research on surplus food in the United States. This methodological improvement is foundational to the comprehensive analysis of surplus food in the United States (and solutions to address it) recently published in From Surplus to Solutions: 2025 ReFED U.S. Food Waste Report.

The Methodology:

Previously, ReFED estimated the amount of food waste generated by the residential sector using consumer loss rates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Loss-Adjusted Food Availability (LAFA) Data Series. This comprehensive dataset covers over 200 commodities and is based on years of expert research. However, the most recent data available, from 2011-2012, does not reflect recent research or changes in consumer food waste behavior over time. Since then, public awareness of food waste has grown, and various consumer education initiatives have been implemented.

To capture these changes while maintaining the high data quality standard set by LAFA, ReFED turned to household food waste research conducted by Ohio State University Professor Brian Roe. This research is part of a collaborative effort between the Ohio State Food Waste Collaborative and the Multiscale RECIPES Sustainable Regional Systems Research Network. Since 2021, Professor Roe has conducted surveys about household food waste three times a year, providing a uniquely consistent and up-to-date dataset that ReFED now uses as the basis for estimating consumer household waste across the United States.

To validate the accuracy of these new estimates, we verified them against a systematic review of waste characterization studies conducted in over 20 states during the past 20 years, which provides a rough baseline for household food waste in landfills. Since the survey data begins in 2021, we backfilled 2016 to 2019 estimates using 2023 waste rates, based on the assumption that recent waste behavior is similar to pre-pandemic consumer behavior. Further details about the methodological changes are available on the ReFED Insights Engine methodology webpages.

What this means:

Since ReFED’s previous estimates likely overestimated the amount of food consumers actually throw out at home, this methodological change provides a more accurate and real-time understanding of the country’s food waste landscape. With these up-to-date waste rates, ReFED’s overall estimate of residential waste is lower by 40 percent or 17 million tons, for 2023. This does not mean dramatic progress has been made to reduce food waste in the residential sector. In fact, these estimates show that consumers still generate the most food waste in the entire food system—furthermore, consumer waste rates are actually increasing.

To all our loyal data users: we realize this is a big change in our surplus food estimates. Please reach out and let us know how this influences your work—we’d be happy to discuss further.