New Delhi, August 5, 2025: WRI India today inaugurated the first edition of ‘RESET: Dialogues to Reduce Food Loss and Waste in India’. The two-day convening marks the beginning of a national engagement to build awareness, strengthen institutional responses, and scale innovations for food loss and food waste reduction across India. The convening brought together over 150 key stakeholders from across local and state government, food businesses, hotels and restaurant industry, food recovery agencies, financial institutions, farmer producer organisations, academia, innovators, and civil society to discuss solutions for the growing challenges of food loss and food waste in India.

Shri Franklin L Khobung, IFoS, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, stated, the need to integrate research, streamline data collection, leverage technological innovations towards solving the food loss problem. He further added, “The Ministry is committed towards tackling farm level losses through awareness generation, good practice dissemination backed by progressive schemes.”

India wastes 7.82 crore tonnes of food annually at the household level equivalent to about 55 kg per person (Food Waste Index Report, 2024), while post-harvest losses exceed Rs. 1.5 lakh crore (NABARD Consultancy Services, 2022). Recognizing this challenge, RESET 2025 focused on aligning data, innovation, and behaviour change across the entire food supply chain. This initiative is aligned with Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 that calls for halving per capita food waste at the retail and consumer level while also reducing losses along food production and supply chains by 2030.

Madhav Pai, CEO, WRI India, underlined this critical issue in his welcome address, “Tackling food loss and food waste is essential not only for reducing environmental burden but also for ensuring equitable access to affordable and nutritious food for all, and economic efficiency. RESET 2025 is a much-needed platform for building a shared national vision and roadmap on this issue.”

Dr. Ruchika Singh, Executive Director, Food, Land and Water program at WRI India, said “RESET 2025 is not just a dialogue — it is a call to action to co-create pathways to reset our food systems. We now have a growing evidence base, tested solutions, and strong interest from the ecosystem to move from intention to implementation. Our efforts must focus on building collaborative, localized, and sustained pathways for food loss and food waste reduction for multiple benefits it can unlock.”

Sessions during the two days will focus on enabling frameworks, technology adoption and innovation, financial models, sustainability strategies, highlighting local and city-level interventions, kitchen innovations by chefs, and strategies to nudge consumer behaviour change.

Reset 2025 also featured an exhibition spotlighting diverse innovations across both food loss and food waste. Thirteen organizations displayed their solutions. These included exhibits by Greenpod Labs, who are inventing packaging solutions using natural plant extracts to extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables, Koel Fresh who showcased their mobile-enabled, automated hydro-cooling units and Agrosoldier who are converting organic waste into valuable resources, such as protein, fat, calcium, and minerals.

The event featured the launch of ‘Compendium of Best Practices and Scalable Solutions’, featuring solutions on food loss and food waste reduction from across India. In addition to this, an ‘Awareness Toolkit on Food Waste Reduction’ was also launched aimed at equipping hotels, restaurants and catering (HoReCa) businesses with communication tools towards nudging consumer behaviour.

About WRI India
WRI India, an independent charity legally registered as the India Resources Trust, provides objective information and practical proposals to foster environmentally sound and socially equitable development. Through research, analysis, and recommendations, WRI India puts ideas into action to build transformative solutions to protect the earth, promote livelihoods, and enhance human well-being. Know more: https://wri-india.org/

For more info, please contact: 
Shweta Prajapati, shweta.prajapati@wri.org 
Satbhan Singh, satbhan.singh@wri.org