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For the first time since the pandemic, food waste in the United States went down. The 2026 ReFED U.S. Food Waste Report puts the drop at 2.2% from the year before, the first year-over-year reduction since the COVID-19 pandemic.
Except, the country still generated $380 billion in surplus food in 2024, and 85% of it, roughly $325 billion, ended up as waste. A dollar figure that size says little on its own. Break it apart by where the food is lost and why, and the data points somewhere most coverage does not look.
More Than Half of Surplus Food Is Generated Before It Reaches Consumers
Most food-waste stories point at the refrigerator. The data splits the blame differently. Households account for 33.5% of surplus food, and once restaurant plate waste is added, consumer-facing waste reaches about 46% of the total. The rest, more than half, is generated before food ever reaches a shopper:
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- Farms: 24.2%
- Manufacturing: 18.8%
- Food service: 17.9%
- Retail: 5.7%
The problem starts long before the fridge, which means the fixes have to start there too.
Producing Too Much Ranks as the Second-Largest Cause of Surplus
So what turns good food into surplus? ReFED sorts the causes across the supply chain, and the ranking is where the mute number starts to speak. Trimmings and byproducts, the peels and off-cuts stripped out during processing, top the list at 30.4%, and much of that is hard to avoid.
The next tier is not. Excess, meaning food produced or ordered beyond what sold, accounts for 23.7%. Spoilage adds 12.9%, and date-label confusion another 5%.
Stack excess and spoilage together, add the losses to date-label confusion, and more than 40% of all surplus food traces back to a single pattern: making more than what sells, then losing perishables before they move.
The food types fit that pattern. Produce alone makes up 45.4% of surplus by weight, with prepared foods and dairy close behind, the items with the shortest shelf lives and the least room for a slow week.
Inventory and Demand-Planning Tools Rank Among ReFED's 2026 Solutions to Watch
Excess and spoilage are operational problems, and operational problems have fixes. ReFED's report names real-time demand planning and inventory management among the approaches most likely to cut waste in 2026, a category that pulled in more than $30 million in private funding in 2025. On the group's ranking of top solutions by volume diverted, manufacturing line optimization sits near the top.
The mechanics are not complicated. Producers that can see stock levels and expiration dates in real time can rotate perishables on a first-expired, first-out basis and size production to real demand instead of a forecast that missed.
Platforms built for that work, such as Fishbowl's inventory management system, track lot and expiry data across the warehouse floor, which is what lets a food producer catch a slow-moving batch before it becomes a write-off rather than after.
Why the $380 Billion Number Reaches Past the Food Industry
The cost of surplus food does not stop at the invoice. Uneaten food still carries the water and fuel that went into growing and moving it, and ReFED ties surplus food to 3.5% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, about the yearly output of 51 million gas-powered cars.
At the same time, nearly one in seven American households faced food insecurity in 2024, while only about 13% of the surplus food that could have been donated actually was.
That gap is getting fresh attention now for a plainer reason: price. Grocery costs sat roughly 29% higher in late 2025 than before the pandemic, so the cost of wasting food climbed with them. Federal date-label legislation, reintroduced this session with bipartisan support, could address more than $19 billion that businesses and shoppers lose each year to expiration-date confusion.
The 2024 decline proved the number can fall. How far it falls next depends on whether producers treat surplus as a disposal cost or an inventory one.
