Billions of tons in food loss and waste at stake in global diets

If historical dietary trends continue, economic modeling shows that food loss and waste could reach 3.26 billion tons by 2050, an increase of 52% over 2014 levels. The modeling also projects that cutting global food loss and waste by half relative to a business-as-usual scenario would boost food availability and lower prices, especially for plant-based foods.

Details of these and other scenarios associated with a global shift to a healthier diet, assessed by Purdue University’s Maksym Chepeliev and Wageningen University’s Alessandro Gatto (now with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD), appeared last October in Lancet Planetary Health. “Combining dietary shift with food loss and waste reduction targets globally reduces food loss and waste by 63.2%,” they reported.

Chepeliev, a research assistant professor in global economic analysis, co-authored four other related studies in the last two years. These include the 2025 EAT-Lancet Report, an update of the landmark 2019 EAT-Lancet Report, and a multimodel assessment of food systems transformation measures, published in Lancet Planetary Health. In 2024, Chepeliev and Gatto also published a study in Nature Food titled “Global food loss and waste estimates show increasing nutritional and environmental pressures,” and another study in Environmental Research Letters that looks into the benefits of reducing global food loss and waste for improving air quality and lowering the risk of premature mortality.

“We are focusing our attention in these studies on understanding the implications of this transition to health, sustainable and affordable diets, highlighting some of its policy needs and potential measures, and implementing some of them in our models,” Chepeliev said.

The 2025 EAT-Lancet report discusses a global shift to a planetary health diet (PHD) that is predominantly plant-based, along with halving food loss and waste by 2050. Chepeliev and Gatto’s Lancet Planetary Health study is the first to assess in detail the interactions between a planetary health diet transition and food loss and waste reductions.

“A healthier and more sustainable diet requires an increase in the consumption of plant-based foods, which are often linked to the highest levels of food loss and waste,” Chepeliev and Gatto wrote.

The EAT-Lancet Reports of 2025 and 2019 both touted the benefits of a global shift toward plant-rich diets, while acknowledging the challenges involved. In the energy sector, imposing a tax can make it more economically feasible to switch to clean energy sources without dramatically increasing costs. But consumer choices loom large in the food arena. 

“One complexity of the food system in general is that food is price inelastic. It’s hard to change consumer choices,” Chepeliev said. Especially in high-income countries, households spend a relatively small share of their budgets on food. Their food spending is, therefore, relatively insensitive to price.

Gatto, an economist at the OECD in France, and Chepeliev developed a model for their Lancet Planetary Health study through which they traced food loss and waste across global supply chains.

“The complexity of this issue is that the food supply chains are geographically distributed. They also have multiple processing stages. So, once you start thinking about how food ends up on your plate, it’s a complicated process,” Chepeliev said.

Many models limit their parameters to farm-level production and processes, leaving out factors that include processed food consumption, foods bought at grocery stores, and food consumption in restaurants and school cafeterias.

Geographical distribution is another key factor that economists must consider when analyzing how food loss and waste occur throughout the supply chain. “Wheat can be produced in Ukraine, exported to Türkiye, processed there, then exported to the U.S. as flour to bake bread,” Chepeliev said.

“It was somewhat unexpected to see how price-inelastic many commodities are,” he noted in the context of ongoing work on dietary transition policies. “We looked into specific policy interventions that might be implemented to achieve healthier diets.” These interventions included levying taxes on foods, like meat, and providing subsidies on foods like vegetables, fruits and nuts.

Chepeliev and colleagues found that even relatively high taxes and subsidies would achieve a relatively modest gain toward healthier diets. That highlighted the need for a comprehensive set of policies and other measures that would affect both supply and demand. The challenge is to somehow encourage a behavioral change that would alter consumption patterns, while also simulating the supply of healthier foods.

Chepeliev and Gatto used the Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) Database, complemented with other inputs, such as nutritional and food loss and waste accounts, to express their models in terms of parameters.

”Envisage is an example of the models that we used. This is a global economywide model,” Chepeliev said. Envisage permits economists to evaluate the impact of different policy interventions — or no such measures — on producers, consumers and the general agrifood economic system over time.

The transition toward a more plant-based diet featured a higher consumption of foods such as vegetables, fruits and nuts, and a lower consumption of animal-based products. Their modeling showed that the transition as a stand-alone factor comes with an unintended spillover. The transition tends to result in higher food loss and waste per unit of consumed food because plant-based foods incur a higher rate of food loss and waste along supply chains than some animal-based foods.

“You need a comprehensive solution so that when you combine your dietary transition with food loss and waste policies, you eliminate the spillovers,” Chepeliev noted.