2025 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit

Food waste is a climate problem—but not just in the ways most people think. Its full environmental toll touches some of the most potent forces driving climate change. Methane and nitrous oxide, both superpollutants with warming potential far exceeding that of CO2, are released throughout the food waste lifecycle. Refrigerants used across the cold chain rank among the most harmful greenhouse gases on the planet. Synthetic fertilizers used to grow food that is never eaten carry their own enormous emissions footprint. And that's before accounting for the staggering volumes of water embedded in discarded food, or the social cost of carbon—a measure of the true economic harm of emissions. This session is designed to give attendees both the scientific grounding to understand these impacts and the messaging tools to communicate them in ways that are honest, accessible, and built to bring more people to the table.

Manufacturing is one of the largest blind spots in food waste research—poorly understood and quantified, yet responsible for substantial losses and cascading effects across the supply chain. But that's changing. Over the past year, LIDD partnered with ReFED on a first-of-its-kind research effort to quantify and characterize food waste across diverse manufacturing settings and food types—findings that will power critical updates to ReFED's Insights Engine and its ongoing analyses. This session's panelists will explore what that data reveals: which solutions are most promising in manufacturing and what it takes to act on them. Speakers will zero in on two high-opportunity approaches—modified atmosphere packaging (MAP) and upcycling—examining their potential to prevent and divert significant volumes of waste while generating benefits that ripple across the supply chain. The session will be a case study in what's possible when rigorous research and cross-sector collaboration point the way toward solutions that are actionable and built to scale.