For years, reducing food waste in the European Union was a matter of strategies and recommendations. That has changed: with the revision of the Waste Framework Directive (Directive (EU) 2025/1892), Member States have received legally binding targets with a deadline.
The numbers
By 31 December 2030, each Member State must reduce food waste by 30% per capita in retail, restaurants, food services and households, and by 10% in processing and manufacturing — against a reference period. This aligns the EU with global Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 of the 2030 Agenda.
Context: around 59 million tonnes of food waste arise in the European Union every year, with an estimated market value of roughly 132 billion euros. A significant share arises precisely in hospitality and food services — the sectors to which the binding 30% target directly applies.
What follows for professional kitchens
The obligation formally rests on states, but states cannot meet it without the sectors where the waste arises. Three things are realistic to expect: more precise tracking of quantities (reduction cannot be proven without measurement), reporting duties cascading to larger entities through ESG frameworks such as the CSRD, and growing public-procurement pressure for documented outcomes instead of declarative claims.
For a kitchen this means the question is no longer "will food waste have to be measured and reduced", but "with what". The Griffon approach is treatment at the point of origin: residues are continuously broken down by aerobic digestion, and built-in scales provide primary mass data — the same kind of data the reporting frameworks require.
Sources: Directive (EU) 2025/1892 amending the Waste Framework Directive; Eurostat food-waste statistics; UN 2030 Agenda, target 12.3.