By What is food waste costing you a year?
Three habit questions plus your weekly shop give an open estimate you can check.
- Food shop
- £4,160 per year
- Share wasted
- 12%
- Wasted per year
- £499
How we estimate
Your answers place your household on a sliding scale from 5% to 20% of your weekly food spend wasted: planned households sit near the bottom, improvised ones near the top, and every answer moves the figure. The scale is our editorial rule of thumb, not a measurement.
WRAP's survey-based benchmark, about £1,000 a year for a family of four, lands inside the middle band for a typical family shop.
Portions are compared at the £5.50 average starting price across the six kits we track. No account, nothing stored.
That share times your weekly shop times 52 gives the yearly figure. It is a transparent rule of thumb, not a measurement.
For calibration: WRAP estimates UK households bin 4.4 million tonnes of edible food a year, worth 17 billion pounds, about 1,000 pounds for an average family of four.
Do meal kits cut waste? See the test
An estimate, not a bill. The figure shows the order of magnitude based on your answers.
Why we show bands, not a fake-precise number
Nobody weighs their bin, and self-reported waste is notoriously optimistic, so a calculator that hands you £847.23 would be lying with decimals. Instead your habits select one of three bands. Planning the week, eating leftovers and checking the fridge before shopping are the three behaviours that most reliably separate low-waste from high-waste households, and they are exactly the levers WRAP’s campaigns target.
The meal-kit connection is real but bounded. Pre-measured portions remove the biggest everyday source of waste, the half-used fresh ingredients, but they cannot remove plate waste or over-ordering. We walk through what is measurable and what is marketing in food waste and meal kits, and the wider money question in are meal kits worth it.