Reduce food waste at home
Food waste is avoidable. You can fight food waste at home by changing a few habits.
Preparing only what you need, storing food appropriately and using your leftovers can reduce household food waste and save money.
Prepare only what you need
Meal plan
- Plan your weekly meals by using a meal plan .
- Plan a specific day to use up your leftovers to create a new meal and make it a weekly routine.
Buy better
- Regularly check what’s in the fridge, freezer and pantry before you go food shopping.
- Purchase the right amount of food. This online portion planner can help make sure you don’t buy too much for each meal.
- Shop with a shopping list.
Prepare only what you need
- Check who is eating before you prepare food.
- Encourage small servings to reduce food waste.
Store food appropriately
Store your food appropriately so it stays fresh and safe to eat for as long as possible.
- Different foods have different storage requirements. Search the A-Z food storage guide for storage tips.
- Check your fridge settings and if needed, adjust the temperature down to between 1-5 degrees Celsius. Most Australian fridges recommend 3 degrees. Check your fridge manual for a temperature setting guide.
- Fight food waste with your freezer. Your freezer can be a useful tool to preserve any unused foods for future use. Label freezer items to monitor their use by date. Use a label template or create your own.
Use your leftovers
Eat your oldest items first
- Make it easy to find food that needs to be used up.
- Have a ‘use it up’ shelf in the fridge or pantry and get everyone in the household to use food from this shelf first.
- Rotate food by moving oldest items to the front/top of fridge or pantry.
- Use transparent containers to easily see what food needs to be used.
Eat your leftovers
- Freeze excess food.
- Cook one meal each week that combines foods that need to be used up.
- Get creative with using your leftovers. Search these recipes to turn your leftovers into a new meal.
- Use your leftovers as a ‘lazy’ lunch.
- Preserve any unused vegetables by pickling or other methods of preserving food.
- Cooked beef, bread slices and rolls, vegetable salads, cooked rice and bananas are some of the foods that are commonly wasted in Australian households.
- Use leftover roast beef in a new dish or turn unused beef mince into burger patties.
- Use stale bread in a pasta bake or chicken curry.
- Add leftover rice into fried rice.
- Turn overripe bananas into banana bread.
- Spice up leftover salad leaves by adding them to a breakfast burrito.