Sponsors (4)
Introduced April 9, 2025 by Christopher A. Coons · Last progress April 9, 2025
The bill channels modest federal funds, coordination, grants, and education to reduce food loss and expand recovery—benefiting low-income households, farmers, and the environment—while imposing taxpayer costs, administrative and compliance burdens, and design features that may favor better-resourced actors and limit equitable reach.
Low-income individuals and households will gain increased access to recovered surplus food and improved distribution (more donations, storage, processing, and temperature-controlled infrastructure), reducing food insecurity.
The federal government establishes a coordinated goal (50% food-loss reduction by 2030), research, measurement tools, and interagency coordination to reduce food loss, which can lower greenhouse gas emissions and guide national policy.
Targeted grants and funding will expand capacity of food recovery organizations and local governments (hiring staff, improving logistics, and building storage/processing infrastructure), improving reliability of food redistribution and food safety.
Taxpayers will fund multiple new offices, grants, and programs (annual appropriations across several titles), increasing federal outlays while the authorized sums are modest and may be insufficient to meet the 50% reduction goal.
Matching fund requirements and new administrative responsibilities could strain state and local budgets and nonprofit capacity, excluding smaller or less-resourced food recovery groups from full participation.
New verification, reporting, and compliance obligations for producers, processors, and federal contractors (including upstream data, labeling validation, and donation/prevention reporting) could raise costs for small businesses and farmers and potentially increase prices for consumers.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Creates a USDA Office, regional coordinators, grants, partnerships, reporting, and an education campaign to halve food loss and waste by 2030.
Creates a new USDA Office of Food Loss and Waste and funds a coordinated federal effort to measure, prevent, recover, and educate about food loss and food waste. The bill sets a federal goal to reduce food loss and waste 50% from 2016 levels by 2030 and provides multi-year authorizations for research, regional coordinators, block grants, public‑private partnership grants, and a national education campaign to support that goal. Requires interagency coordination (USDA, EPA, FDA, and others), mandates reporting and contractor donation/reporting actions, supports infrastructure and distribution improvements, and funds data collection and pilot projects to improve measurement and recovery across the supply chain.