Winner: Reaching Zero Edible Food Waste - Charlie Bigham’s
It’s easy to set targets when it comes to food waste. It’s much tougher to actually hit them, let alone several months ahead of schedule. But that’s exactly what Charlie Bigham’s managed to achieve with its multi-pronged effort to slash wasted surplus across its value chain.
Three years ago, it set an ambition to eliminate all edible food waste across its London and Somerset kitchens by the end of 2025, with a preliminary target to reduce food waste by 50% in 2024. To do so the manufacturer invested in advanced weighing and tracking technology that provided , for the first time, precise, real-time visibility of exactly where waste occurs and why.
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From there its team quickly began scouting potential solutions, working closely with its charity partners to safely store and repackage a broader range of foods for redistribution. For example, 100kg of chicken wings had been going to waste each day, but a pilot programme with City Harvest found a way to donate this fresh meat in family-sized portions. Pastry off-cuts were also reclassified as ‘opportunities’, with 83 tonnes saved as a result. These moves have meant that, since August 2025, no edible food waste has been thrown away in Charlie Bigham’s kitchens, and its redistribution efforts reached 350,000 meals in 2025 alone. There’s also been a commercial benefit, with better forecasting and tighter control of ingredients delivering a £130,000 saving along the way.
Charlie Bigham’s achievement was testament to both the game-changing power of integrating new technologies into production and the cumulative impact of making incremental changes over time, said our judges. “Its impressive achievements can provide a blueprint for other large manufacturers looking to do the same,” they said, particularly given its “powerful” combination of both reduction and redistribution initiatives. “This has the potential to make a real difference, paving the way to change production bit-by-bit” across a wide range of businesses.
Shortlisted:
- Barfoots in collaboration with FareShare and Saica Flex – Project Rubble
- Booker Group – 25 million meals
- Charlie Bigham’s – Reaching Zero Edible Food Waste
- Lidl GB – Too Good to Waste
- Omega Pressery – From Waste to Worth
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