Kilograms of food wasted per person per year, split between household, food service, and retail. 2022 estimates across 184 countries.
Kilograms of food wasted per person per year, 2022 estimates. Source: UNEP Food Waste Index Report, via Our World in Data. Most countries have no direct measurement: household figures are estimated by extrapolating from countries with primary studies, adjusted for income level, while retail and food service figures are largely modelled defaults applied by income group. Identical values across unrelated countries indicate modelled rather than measured data.
Most countries in this dataset have never measured their food waste. That is not a minor caveat; it shapes what the map can and cannot tell you.
UNEP estimates household waste for countries without primary studies by extrapolating from the countries that have them, adjusted for income level. Retail and food service figures are largely modelled defaults applied across income groups.
The evidence is visible in the numbers themselves. Morocco, Egypt and India all show exactly 9.7 kg per person in retail. Morocco and Egypt both show exactly 31.1 kg in food service. Identical figures across unrelated economies are the signature of a modelled default, not a measurement.
Household figures vary more between countries and are the most defensible part of the dataset. Even there, UNEP rates confidence as low or very low for the majority of countries.
The honest reading is that this map shows the best available global estimate of a quantity most countries do not track, and that the estimate is more reliable as a global total than as a country comparison.
Roughly a fifth of food available to consumers is wasted at the retail and consumption stages. Household waste accounts for around 60% of that.
The finding that most surprised the UNEP authors is that per-capita household waste differs far less between high-income and lower-income countries than had been assumed. Food waste is not a problem confined to wealthy societies.
Food loss earlier in the chain — during harvest, storage and transport — is a separate measurement and is not included here. In lower-income countries that stage often accounts for larger losses than consumer waste does, which means this map understates the total problem in exactly the places where it is most severe.
Food systems and their sustainability run through several of my papers:
Read alongside water stress, which measures the resource cost of producing the food that gets wasted.
Data from the UNEP Food Waste Index Report, via Our World in Data.