That adds up to a staggering $2.9 billion worth of wasted food nationwide—or about 86 kilograms per household annually! (Source: Hello Fresh Understanding Kiwi Households Food Waste Report, 2024).
This amount of wasted food is equal to one year of meals for 536,000 Kiwis.
The good news? This is a decrease from 2023, when a self-reported study by Rabobank and KiwiHarvest (Kantar New Zealand Food Waste Survey) estimated household food waste at $1,510 per year, totaling $3.2 billion.
So, are Kiwis making progress in the fight against food waste? Scroll down to find out what’s changing—and how you can save food, money, and the planet!
The biggest culprit is food going off before it can be finished or before its ‘use by’ or ‘best before’ date. Forgetting about food in the fridge or pantry is another key factor, along with leftovers not being eaten in time.
Other common reasons include picky eaters in the household, last-minute changes to meal plans, lack of meal planning, buying more food than needed due to sales or bulk deals, and not knowing how to use certain ingredients.
But we also waste a lot of food because we buy too much of it and don’t store it correctly.
We have lots of tips to help you know the best way to store your food and delicious ways to cook it so you will never need to throw it out again.
Over half of the food we waste is vegetables—making them the most discarded food in New Zealand. A staggering 57% of wasted food is made up of veggies, often because they aren’t eaten in time and go off before we get to them. Let’s be honest—limp celery and wilted spinach aren’t exactly appealing!
But it’s not just whole vegetables getting tossed out. We also throw away loads of scraps like potato peelings, pumpkin skins, and broccoli stalks—many of which are perfectly edible or can be composted instead of ending up in the bin. Small changes can make a big difference!
These can all be eaten or composted rather than going in your rubbish bin.
We throw away 29 million loaves of bread a year! And that’s just the stuff that goes into the rubbish bin – not bread which is feed to birds or ducks.
Many people find their bread goes mouldy or stale because of our humid climate. The best place to store your bread is in the fridge or the freezer to stop it growing mould.
We also throw out a lot of crusts and the ends of the loaves because we don’t like to eat them. It is such a waste to throw away this perfectly good bread as there are many things we can do with it.
You may think you are doing a good thing by leaving your bread out for the birds or feeding ducks, but it’s actually not that good for them.
There were a few surprises in things that Kiwis threw out when we conducted our bin audits in 2018!
We know Kiwis like fish and chips, but it turns out our scoop of chips is too big with 2,755 tonnes of takeaway chips being thrown out each year.
Cake was another thing found in rubbish bins that we were surprised to see. Kiwis throw away 1,787 tonnes of cakes every year!
What didn’t come as a surprise was that the traditional lunchbox staple, sandwiches, were commonly thrown away. Encouraging your children to eat their sandwiches for afternoon tea is an easy way to prevent 1,430 tonnes of sandwiches going to landfill every year.
For other parts of the food supply chain such as supermarkets, cafes, manufacturers we have some information on what they waste, but no one knows the total amount of food wasted across the whole supply chain. You can find out what we do know here.
