Household
Food Waste Audit

Sign up to get our audit resources and reminders

Welcome to your one-week food waste audit! This is an excellent opportunity to become more mindful of your food consumption habits and identify areas where you can reduce waste. Remember, this isn’t about being perfect or feeling guilty—it’s simply about observation.

Please note! We are beta testing this process, you may encounter glitches, and if you do, we’d like to hear about it! Please let us know if you have any feedback along the way.

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Sign Up for Your Audit!

- Step 1 of 3

Name *

Email *

Phone

Start Date

Pick a 7 day period that will be typical for your food waste.

Next

What percent of your meals do you cook?

Selected Value: 50

How many people do you usually cook for?

Would you like to share optional demographic data?No, thank you.No, thank you.Yes, no problem!

We'll never sell or share your data. It will be used to improve our messaging and program. You can purge your data from our system at any point.

Housing situation

Shared apartment, single family home, unhoused, dorm, fraternity house, co-op, on the road, etc.

What is the composition of your household?

Single, couple without children, couple with young children, couple with adult children living at home, roommates, cooperative, etc..

Next

Guidelines

Try not to change your habits during the audit to make the data as accurate as possible.

Don't judge yourself! Try to approach this with curiosity, not criticism.

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How it works:

Setup

While these are just recommendations, it will help you have a successful week!

1. Dedicated food waste container (e.g. a bowl for prep waste as you’re cooking so you don’t need to stop and log each item.
2. Signage, a sign on your trash as a reminder that you’re tracking food waste this week can be an excellent cue in case you accidentally start throwing something away without tracking.
3. Paper or digital note (we have templates!) We recommend keeping track in the quickest way possible throughout the day to make it as easy as possible to capture your food waste activity. Then, once a day we’ll remind you to log it in the system.

During the Audit

Throughout each day during your audit you’ll track all the food you discard—no matter where it goes: in your dedicated container, down the sink, in the compost, in the trash, or out in public.

At the end of the day, or the beginning of the next day you’ll go through your tracking sheet and log the items with amount and reason in the food log we’ll provide you.

After

Reflect on the areas where you had the most preventable food waste and pick one tactic that will have the biggest impact on your particular waste habits.