If the United States went shopping in your store, it would leave with five bags, drop two in the parking lot, and leave them there. This may seem crazy, but as a country, we leave a full 40 percent of our food uneaten. And it’s not just food going in the trash: Up to about one-fifth of U.S. cropland, fertilizers, and agricultural water go towards growing food that’s ultimately wasted. Food waste is responsible for at least 2.6 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to more than that of 37 million cars), and wasting less food was ranked third of 100 solutions to climate change by Project Drawdown.

So we're bringing you a retailer-specific set of best practices to help you mitigate in-store food waste, saving you emissions, lost food, and cutting costs.

View the toolkit in full here.

To develop the toolkit we visited a number of retailers within the Climate Collaborative network--to learn their best practices and help support their efforts to go deeper, and we want to share them with you. In the 10-step toolkit you can find lessons on Canyon Market's approach to inventory management, Bi-Rite's work to build a robust in-store culture promoting food waste reduction, and more.

This project is sponsored by KeHE and is in partnership with Dana Gunders at Next Course. If you have questions or would like to get involved email [email protected].