Strategic AGMARDT support helped Food Waste Champions 12.3 recruit industry giants to co-design New Zealand’s first voluntary food waste commitment, reducing their food waste sent to landfill by 85%.

More than 28 million meals that might have ended in landfill have instead fed New Zealanders, thanks to three years of collaboration between food businesses that agreed to measure, report, and reduce their food waste together.

The voluntary food waste agreement, Kai Commitment, now has eleven signatories: Silver Fern Farms, Goodman Fielder, Nestle NZ, Woolworths NZ, Fonterra, Foodstuffs, Mars NZ, George Weston Foods, AS Wilcox, WasteMINZ and Compass Group NZ. It was included in the first Emissions Reduction Plan, launched with Prime Ministerial support in 2022.

Coordinated by Food Waste Champions 12.3, leaders in New Zealand’s food industry collaborated to co-design a strategy to reduce waste across the entire system, from farm to fork.

The strategy is working. Together the Kai Commitment signatories have measured an 85% reduction in food waste sent to landfill. Better operational practices have been implemented, reducing expired stock waste by 58%. It’s also been good for our environment, reducing greenhouse gas emissions roughly equivalent to taking 67,000 cars off the road in the past year alone. Most importantly, the businesses are embedding practices to reduce food waste – 57% now include a food waste KPI and 100% include food waste reduction in their staff training.

Silver Fern Farms report that the structured measurement framework has given them new insights, particularly around maximising the value of co-products, says Nicola Johnston, acting chief customer officer at Silver Fern Farms.

“Kai Commitment has strengthened how we map, measure and act on opportunities to reduce any animal-related waste across our operation,” says Johnston. “The insights and support from Kai Commitment have helped us achieve a 95% reduction in organic waste to landfill. To us this is really about respecting our role in the food system, the animals and the farmers that produce it, and delivering goodness to our customers.”

“The insights and support from Kai Commitment have helped us achieve a 95% reduction in organic waste to landfill.”
—Nicola Johnston, acting chief customer officer at Silver Fern Farms

 

The co-design process at the start of the project explains its later success, says Food Waste Champions 12.3 Executive Director, Kaitlin Dawson. “Kai Commitment meets businesses where they are, to support accelerating their food waste reduction journey, and we challenge our signatories and our stakeholders to work collaboratively on projects that are much bigger than their own objectives as businesses.”

“What we hear most is that businesses say they wouldn’t waste food because that’s wasting money,” says Dawson, “but once they start measuring or pulling existing data together, they absolutely find opportunities to reduce waste.”

The reported total cost of food not sold and disposal across Kai Commitment signatories has fallen 44%, from $338 million in the baseline year to $190 million in 2025.

The flagship Kai Commitment programme was co-funded by AGMARDT, its second of three grants totalling $68,600 to Food Waste Champions 12.3 between 2020 and 2025. An earlier grant funded the first Food Waste Reduction Map, which created clear action pathways the organisation still follows, and in 2025 a survey on Food Sector Practice on Food Loss and Waste was funded to provide insight into business perceptions and priorities.

The common thread across all three projects is collaboration and connection across the food system.

“The only way to ultimately reduce food waste across the system is for us to work together as a whole food system,” says Dawson. “AGMARDT gets that collaboration and a systemic view from farm to fork is needed.”

“The only way to ultimately reduce food waste across the system is for us to work together as a whole food system”
—Food Waste Champions 12.3 Executive Director, Kaitlin Dawson

 

The true value of the AGMARDT grants was in its strategic support for fostering connection and collaboration, says Dawson. “It’s so much more than the quantum of funding. The core benefit from AGMARDT was enabling us to commence relationships that were ultimately really game-changing for us, then strengthen and deepen those relationships through the projects that AGMARDT has funded – and then secondly, enable us to access other funding.”

Food Waste Champions 12.3 has been able to grow to a team of three with the backing of three core funders: a three-year partnership with the Ministry of Environment, and operational funding from Whakatupu Aotearoa Foundation and Tindall Foundation, which also provide strategic guidance.

While the first phases of work have focussed on food manufacturers, farmers and growers are always in the frame. “We want to see pathways to market for all food produced in New Zealand, so that farmers and growers are remunerated for every food item produced,” says Dawson.

Dawson says the aim is for food waste to be considered in every decision and process, the same way plastic packaging is now considered. “It’s about embedding these practices across the food system in the hope that Food Waste Champions 12.3 won’t need to exist in future, because they just become business as usual,” says Dawson.

“While we haven’t yet achieved the scale we would like to, we’ve achieved great depth and lasting changes within our collaborations. This is harder to quantify and report, but has more long-term impact on the system.”

Grants:

A21003 Food Waste Reduction Map ($15,000), 2021

A22001 Kai Commitment ($20,000), 2022

A25013 Food Sector Practice on Food Loss and Waste ($33,600), 2025