Buy one get one free deals could be banished from supermarket shelves under a government plan to reduce Britain’s food waste mountain.

Supermarket chiefs will be told instead to offer half-price deals on perishable food and package food in a greater range of sizes to suit the single person’s fridge as well as the family’s.

Bogofs are one of the main reasons why a third of all food is wasted, a report on food security and sustainability found.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is demanding that stores agree to tough targets on reducing food waste or face legislation forcing them to make savings.

Households throw away 4.1 million tonnes of food each year that could have been eaten if it had been managed better, according to Wrap, the Government’s waste watchdog. Food waste costs the average household £420 a year and the average person throws away more than their own weight in food annually. Single-person households – which now represent almost a third of all homes – waste the most, partly because bogofs encourage them to buy quantities they cannot eat by the use-by date.

The British Retail Consortium said it would resist attempts to restrict bogofs.

“Retailers know their customers better and should be allowed to decide what’s the best policy,” a BRC spokesman said.

Defra and the Food Standards Agency are also preparing new guidance to reduce confusion about date labels on food. Wrap research found that millions of people did not know the difference between ‘sell-by’ and ‘use-by’ dates and also failed to realise that they could eat food after the ‘best-before’ date had expired.

A new label, the Healthier Food Mark, will be launched this year for food that meets minimum standards for nutrition and sustainability. Hospitals and prisons will buy food with the mark and it will be rolled out nationwide from 2012.