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Our Grocery businesses continue to focus on making improvements in their waste and packaging.
Dorset Cereals packaging on the production line in Poole, UK
The principles of circularity and efficient resource use align with the management approach across our Grocery businesses, because alongside delivering environmental benefits, they directly support operational efficiency and cost control.
Stricter regulations on waste management, single-use plastic and carbon emissions, alongside rising consumer expectations, are also shaping how our Grocery businesses manage resources.
In 2025, the Grocery businesses decreased total waste by 3% compared with the previous year. The decrease was driven by waste management projects across the segment. Of the total waste generated, 86% was recycled, recovered or sent for other beneficial use.
With a portfolio including staples such as bread, flour, rice, noodles, bagged sugars, tea, cooking sauces and breakfast cereals, reducing food waste is a major focus for Grocery Group businesses.
In the UK, they are signatories to the UK Food and Drink Pact, which targets a 50% per capita reduction in food waste by 2030 against a 2007 baseline. Each business has set internal food waste reduction targets and is implementing strategies under the Pact’s ‘Target, Measure, Act’ framework. For example, Silver Spoon’s investment in a new pump at its Bardney site in the UK has cut liquid sugar waste by an average of 1 tonne per week, which represents a 40% reduction.
Between 2015 and 2024, food waste tonnage from Grocery Group business operations in the UK decreased by 22%. By the end of calendar year 2024, 90% of food waste was sent to the animal feed sector, and a further 8% was used for energy generation as it was unsuitable for animal feed. Additionally, Grocery Group businesses in the UK have increased donations of surplus food to food banks again, with over 650 tonnes donated in calendar year 2024.
Twinings Ovaltine is reducing its waste output by focusing on improved operational efficiencies, implementing various initiatives to reduce waste at source. These initiatives include improving machine efficiencies, reusing production waste, returning plastic packaging materials back to suppliers after use and promoting a waste segregation culture across the business.
Twinings is progressing towards its Zero Waste to Landfill target. All manufacturing waste is recycled or recovered, with organic waste sent for industrial composting or used in animal feed. All packaging waste is recycled and the business is working towards a circular model for tertiary packaging, with pallets and plastic reels returned to suppliers for reuse. Its UK and Polish manufacturing sites achieved zero waste to landfill in 2025.
Ovaltine is close to achieving Zero Waste to Landfill, with most waste recovered or recycled for use as animal feed, fertiliser or biogas.
Since 2022, Tip Top has been a signatory of the Australian Food Pact, which aims to halve food waste in Australia by 2030. The business has developed a Food Waste Action Plan on reducing returns and food waste in its bakeries and customers' homes. It has an efficient resource use programme with most waste repurposed into breadcrumbs or animal feed. Less than 1% of its food waste is sent to landfill.
ACH has made an investment in reducing waste by enhancing production efficiency and recycling waste materials.
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Waste Generated | 96 | 83 | 85 | 94 | 91 |
| Waste recycled | 86% | 84% | 82% | 86% | 86% |
| 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grocery | 147 | 158 | 142 | 142 | 149 |
Packaging has an important role to play in ensuring the safety and quality of products. Across many programmes and initiatives, the businesses are working to reduce packaging and increase recyclability and reusability.
In 2025, our Grocery businesses’ total packaging increased by 5% compared to the previous year, in part due to increased production volumes. Across the segment, businesses are working on changes in production mix and volumes, as well as projects within the businesses to replace plastic packaging with alternative materials such as cardboard.
Since 2018, the Grocery Group’s UK businesses have been members of the UK Plastics Pact, led by WRAP. The Pact commits signatories to eliminate problematic or unnecessary single-use packaging through redesign, innovation or alternative delivery models. The commitment requires food producers and other users of plastic materials to factor recyclability into the specification and design of their packaging. It also requires the waste reprocessing sector to adapt to ensure that those materials that technically can be recycled easily are collected and taken for reprocessing.
In calendar year 2024, 88% of packaging materials were either fully recyclable in the UK or recyclable where recycling facilities exist. Materials classified as difficult to recycle across branded foods account for less than 0.2% of all packaging and materials.
In 2025, AB World Foods incorporated 30% post-consumer recycled content into PET bottles and introduced recycled stretch film at its Leigh factory, significantly reducing virgin plastic use. Jordans Dorset Ryvita reduced plastic use associated with their granola pouches by 11% through a granola film down-weighting project, while Silver Spoon is transitioning its larger packs to more recyclable materials, which will eliminate 47 tonnes of non-recyclable packaging. Additionally, Silver Spoon has completed a plastic reduction project to reduce new plastic across all sites for shrink and stretch wrap, which has removed 33 tonnes of plastic annually.
The Grocery Group businesses in the UK have been investing in the collection, verification and reporting of additional packaging data to facilitate compliance with the requirements of the Recyclability Assessment Methodology under the UK’s extended producer responsibility for packaging regulations.
Twinings is working hard to minimise its packaging materials, with the aim of using more sustainable alternatives, increasing recycled content, eliminating single-use plastic and improving recyclability. To help achieve this, packaging sustainability is built into its new product development process and design for recyclability guidelines.
Twinings has already made significant progress, removing plastic wrap from around 75% of its cartons and ensuring all tea bags produced at its main manufacturing sites in Andover, UK and Swarzędz, Poland are made with plant-based, industrially compostable tea paper. Its string and tag bags produced in Swarzędz, accounting for 70% of the bags it produces, are also third-party certified as home compostable. In terms of overall consumer packaging from these two manufacturing sites, 25% is currently compostable, 64% recyclable1, 1% is designed for recycling and 10% is currently not recyclable.
George Weston Foods is a signatory to the Australian Packaging Covenant Organisation (APCO), a non-profit organisation established under Australian regulation to advance recycling. While APCO is a key element of its plastics and packaging strategy, the business also addresses packaging challenges through a Packaging Working Group and by trialling new materials. For example, Tip Top has introduced bread bags with 30% post-consumer recycled plastic, certified under the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification PLUS Scheme, using the mass balance method. This industry-leading first for the Australian sliced packaged bread aisle will remove 160 tonnes of virgin plastic by the end of 2025.
Tip Top has also moved to 100% recycled cardboard cartons across all retail and food service products, eliminating around 500 tonnes of virgin cardboard each year, reducing reliance on virgin fibre while maintaining food safety and quality standards.
DON is shifting from traditional thermoforming packs to innovative resealable packaging, cutting plastic use by up to 50%.
1.For packaging to be considered recyclable, recycling must be available ‘in practice and at scale’, beyond lab or pilot tests, to demonstrate that the design is not a barrier to recycling and can be widely replicated.
