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 (PDF, 3.1 MB) .
• 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 (PDF, 3.1 MB) 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.