Food waste statistics: households, money and scale
US households waste about $762 of food per person per year. Fresh produce, bread and dairy are the most-wasted categories, and household waste is the largest single stage of food loss in developed countries.
Household figures
About $762 of food per person per year goes uneaten in US homes, according to ReFED. That is roughly $1,524 for a couple, $3,048 for a family of four, and $4,572 for a household of six.
Measured against food-at-home spending, that is somewhere around a fifth of the grocery bill — though the share varies considerably with how a household shops and cooks.
What gets wasted
Fresh produce leads by a wide margin, followed by bread and dairy. The ranking tracks two properties almost exactly: how fast the food spoils, and how badly the package size overshoots what one meal needs.
Shelf-stable goods barely feature. A bag of rice that sits unopened for six months is not waste; it is inventory.
Where households sit in the supply chain
Food is lost at every stage — farm, processing, distribution, retail and home. In developed countries the home is the single largest stage, which is counterintuitive to most people, who assume supermarkets throw away more than they do.
That matters for what an individual can change. Retail and farm losses are someone else’s decisions. Household waste is the one stage where a household’s own choices are the whole story.
Sources
The per-person dollar figure is ReFED’s. Background on categories, causes and national totals comes from the USDA and the EPA, both linked below. Where a figure here is arithmetic rather than published — scaling $762 to a household of four, for instance — the arithmetic is shown so it can be checked.
Dollar figures travel badly between countries, which is why our price pages are kept in each market's own currency rather than converted, including the grocery prices we read in Egypt.
Common questions
- What percentage of food is wasted in the US?
- Estimates put total US food loss and waste at roughly a third of the food supply across the whole chain, with households the largest single stage in that total.
- How much food does one person waste a year?
- About $762 worth in the US, per ReFED’s household food waste research.
Waste figures from ReFED, with background from the USDA and the EPA. Household figures are averages and vary widely.