If reducing the amount of food you waste is amongst your goals for this year, a food waste audit might be useful to help you identify some small changes you can make and build on over time.

A food waste audit is a review of what food you’re throwing away and why. You track, as best you can, your food waste over a period of seven days.

Whenever you throw food out that could have been eaten, make a note of it – what was the food, how much of it did you throw out, why did you throw it out and can you estimate the cost of the food you threw out?

When you’re done, what are your findings? Are there some trends that you can address? Have you been buying too much, storing food incorrectly, or gone wild in the supermarket discount aisle and then not known what to do with it all?

Choose a couple of small changes to implement and once they’ve become a habit repeat the process and choose some more changes to make. You’ll soon be cutting that figure down from 1/5 to next to nothing.

Message me if you’d like a food waste audit template to work from or if you need help with some ideas of how to tackle your waste.