Australian households waste 2.5 million tonnes of food per year according to the National Food Waste Baseline (Arcadis 2019). Tackling food waste in this part of the supply chain is the focus of our ENGAGE project Designing effective interventions to reduce household food waste. From a national benchmark survey, data was gathered from 5200 households. Amongst these findings was the startling fact that only 23% of household food managers recalled seeing anything about reducing food waste in the past 12 months. For there to be a reduction in household food waste, Australians need to know that this is an issue. We need to increase the number of Australians that recall seeing something about food waste as repetition is an important component of effective communication.
Across 2020, Australians faced tough economic conditions as a result of the COVID-19 and associated economic disruptions. Therefore, getting the message out there that reducing food waste can save money became even more important. The aims of this project were two-fold:
While we are not even close to having all the answers yet, the Fight Food Waste – ‘It’s Easy As’ campaign has given us more success than we forecast, and it has also given us some very valuable lessons for the future. After running this digital campaign on Facebook and Instagram, we have learned a lot! We have more questions than ever, but we’re sharing some of our key lessons (these are further outlined in the Food Waste Bite and the final report):
We will be doing a thematic analysis on the commentary received in this campaign so watch this space for those results!
July 2020 – November 2020
Tanya Wilkins FFW CRC Communication Manager