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Collaborative actions, particularly through public-private partnerships, are essential to achieving Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12.3, which aims to reduce food waste. PPPs involve stakeholders across the food supply chain working together to address food loss at various stages. This promotes cooperation and highlights the shared responsibility of organizations, businesses, and consumers to minimize waste and reduce food insecurity.
Image Source: UNEP
The global food system involves numerous stakeholders across various activities, including production, processing, distribution, consumption, and disposal of food products. Food loss and waste are problems emerging across the whole system, across multiple stakeholders, often with separation between the root cause of the waste and the respective supply chain stages. Collaborative efforts are essential to achieving SDG 12.3 and implementing necessary systemic changes.
One approach that has been shown to help drive food waste reduction across the entire food supply chain is the public-private partnership (PPP). This initiative aims to unite diverse actors, from international organizations and national governments to large and small businesses, all the way to consumers around shared goals. The PPP model has a number of qualities that enable and drive collaborative impact.
Figure 1. Qualities of the public-private partnership model
The PPP framework for addressing food surplus, loss, and waste is based on research across multiple countries and uses the “Target, Measure, Act” approach, which sets clear targets, standardizes methodologies, and drives coordinated action to reduce food loss and waste. It encompasses four complementary parts: (1) Strategy and commitment through collective targets and a delivery roadmap to ensure that targets can be achieved; (2) Collaborative activities including members’ individual contribution and collaborative effort through action-oriented working groups, projects, campaigns and reporting; (3) Outputs designed to support the delivery of targets including guidance and reports to support wide adoption, pilot activity to test and develop approaches within the local context, and the provision of industry recommendations; and (4) Impact, measured annually to inform progress of the overall vision.
Figure 2. Framework for food waste public-private partnership
The model is designed to promote continuous improvement through regular review and refinement to maximize impact, supported by a governance structure with representatives from various food systems or sectors relevant to the PPP. It has been adopted globally, with initiatives on six continents and others in development.
Reference:
United Nations Environment Programme (2024). Food Waste Index Report 2024. Nairobi. Retrieved November 21, 2025 from https://www.unep.org/resources/publication/food-waste-index-report-2024
