Food waste calculator

Enter what you spend on groceries in a week and roughly how much of it gets thrown out, and this food waste calculator shows what that costs you a week, a month and a year. Beside your own number it puts the EPA's estimate for a household your size. Nothing you type leaves your browser.

Where the benchmark comes from

The comparison line is the EPA's, from Estimating the Cost of Food Waste to American Consumers (April 2025). It puts the cost of food a US consumer pays for and does not eat at $728 a year, or $14 a week. Scaled to four people that is $2,913 a year and $56 a week, and about 256 pounds of food per person.

Two things about that number are worth knowing before you compare yourself to it.

It covers food bought to eat at home and food bought at restaurants, because the underlying USDA data doesn't separate the two. And it prices everything at grocery-store prices, which the report says makes it an underestimate: restaurant food costs more per pound than the same food from a shop.

The method is USDA's Loss-Adjusted Food Availability series for how much is wasted, by commodity and weight, priced with NielsenIQ retail data for 2023. Meat is the single most expensive thing Americans throw away, at about $133 a person a year, followed by dairy at $74. By weight the biggest category is added sugars and sweeteners, which is a good illustration of why weight and money answer different questions. The other national figures you'll see quoted, from 29% to "30 to 40 percent", are set out with the year each one describes in food waste statistics 2026.

Is it 11% or 30%?

Both numbers get quoted and they measure different things.

The EPA report works out that the cost of consumer food waste is about 11% of what a consumer spends on food, at home and away. USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service writes that about 30% of the food supply is lost or wasted at the retail and consumer levels (Food Product Dating). The first is a share of money at consumer level, the second a share of the food supply across retail and consumers. Neither is your household's number.

That's what the percentage field is for. Start at 11% if you have no idea, then replace it with something you measured.

How to measure your own share instead of guessing

Guessing is unreliable in one direction: people underestimate. The fix is a fortnight of writing things down.

Keep a note on the fridge for two weeks. Every time something gets thrown out, write the item and roughly what it cost.
Get the prices from your receipts rather than memory. A bag of salad, half a rotisserie chicken and a carton of milk are easy to name but hard to price from recall.
Total the two weeks, halve it, and divide by your weekly grocery spend. That's your share.
Put it in the calculator above.

The things that show up on those fridge notes are usually the same every time: salad leaves, bread, leftovers nobody claimed, and whatever was bought in a big pack because the unit price was better. Your own share is also the number that decides whether the next big pack is worth it: see the break-even math for buying in bulk. Our unit price calculator settles the pack-size question, and a pantry inventory list stops the second jar of the thing you already had.

Dates are the other half. Writing down what turns next, rather than trusting a glance at the fridge, is what an expiration date tracker is for, and our guide to tracking grocery spending has the receipt method behind step 2. Duneed, our iPhone app, sets a reminder as an item's date approaches, and Premium counts what was thrown away and what it cost using the prices from your receipts.

Questions

How much food does the average American household waste?

On the EPA's 2025 estimate, a four-person household pays for about $2,913 of food a year that nobody eats, which is $56 a week and roughly 1,025 pounds. Per person it's $728 a year.

Why is my number so different from the EPA's?

Because the EPA figure is an average that includes restaurant meals, and because it is built from national food-availability data rather than from what you buy. A household that eats at home, shops weekly and cooks leftovers can be well under it. One that buys fresh produce for a plan it doesn't follow can be over.

What is the most expensive thing to stop wasting?

Meat, on the EPA's own numbers: $133 per person a year, more than any other category, with dairy second. A household that fixes nothing else but stops throwing away meat and milk has taken the biggest single bite out of the bill.

How much would a better budget save?

That's a different question, and the grocery budget calculator answers it: what USDA says food should cost for your household, at four price levels.