A standardised framework for food loss and waste prevention: Integrating definitions, causes, destinations, and a circularity index

This paper presents a standardised framework for food loss and waste prevention that harmonises operational definitions, a cause taxonomy, and a hierarchy of destinations aligned with EU regulatory guidance, and demonstrates its application through the full food supply chain case study of a prepared salad in Spain. The framework combines a selection of definitions, methodology to identify points of food loss and waste (FLW) generation using NACE codes, a decision-tree that identifies the feasible optimal destination for each FLW flow, and a FLW circularity index to measure FLW prevention/management performance. Such an index works by weighting destinations (prevention = 1; recycling ≈ 0.80; recovery ≈ 0.55; disposal = 0), with weights chosen via sensitivity analysis of multi-country data and LCA-based evidence. The framework was validated with data covering Primary production, Processing and manufacturing, and Retail and other distribution of food (1 year of data), as well as Households (4 months of data for 10 households), processed with two digital monitoring tools. Results show Processing and manufacturing contributes most to FLW avoided (≈60.5%), while Households generate the largest share of FLW (≈61.9% of generated flows). The FLW circularity score indicates that the producer achieved the highest efficiency, while households performed the poorest. The results confirm that the framework can be operationalised with existing data sources and digital tools, and is adaptable to diverse contexts and products. The study concludes that this approach provides a robust basis for characterising FLW prevention actions, measuring FLW related metrics, and allowing cross-case comparability.