The fundamental idea behind the impact of food wastage on the economy is simple – food costs money, food gets thrown away, therefore money gets thrown away too.

The FAO estimates that one-third of global food production never gets consumed, creating a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food wasted annually. In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council of the United States reported that about 40% of all food was wasted, which amounted to US$165 billion (S$231 billion). In Britain, families are found to discard an average of £700 worth of food each year, which amounts to about S$19,000 worth of food wasted per household per year. These alarming figures bring to question the ethics of wasting food; while the more affluent can dispose of excess food so easily, millions of people in developing countries die from starvation yearly. This will be further discussed in the next section on the social impacts of wasting food.

Aside from consumers, food distributers such as restaurants and grocery stores also experience adverse economical impacts from food wastage. Tesco, a renowned supermarket chain in Britain, reported that 28,500 tonnes of food waste was generated in its stores during the first half of the fiscal year 2013/2014, which was about 0.87% of their total sales volume. Although this amount seems small, it is only a small fraction of the total amount of waste accrued in the country. Expanding on this further, one can only imagine the total amount of money lost from all sources of food wastage on a global scale!

In Singapore, where the lack of land prevents us from easily discarding wasted food into landfills, more money has to be invested into constructing incinerators, which are both costly and contribute to air pollution, which may then incur even more cost to treat the pollutants produced from burning food waste before they are released into the air. Hence, wasting food is very costly phenomenon, and should be avoided in the first place.