Food waste in schools from various countries: A systematic review

Introduction. According to the UN definition of food waste is a reduction in the quality, quantity of food as a consequence of the actions of catering companies. According to Footprint, worldwide the amount of food waste was about 1.05 billion tons, including inedible parts of food, which is 132 kilograms per capita, and also occupies almost a fifth of all products that are available to people, this data was presented in 2022.

The aim – to study the relevance and effectiveness of methods to reduce food waste in schools.

This article used the method of systematic review using the PRISMA flow chart, to conduct an analysis with a description of the literature found, articles with research in English published on such scientific databases as PubMed, Google scholar, published over the period from 2013 to 2023 were used.

According to the search results, five thousand eight hundred sixteen reports were viewed in PubMed, and 9,580 in Google scholar, the total number of articles was 15,396. After deleting duplicate articles, 15,385 remained, then the selection was carried out by name and the presence of keywords in it, after which 25 articles remained, further if the annotation indicated that the study the method of systematic review was used, if the content of the abstract did not coincide with the topic, or the study was not conducted in schools and if it was conducted in public catering facilities, these articles were excluded, after which the sum of the selected articles was 10.

Conclusion. Analyzing selected studies conducted in six countries around the world, it should be noted that there is a need to use effective methods to reduce food waste in schools. In some countries, both similar methods have been used, such as informing school children about food waste and nutrition at school, and unique ones, such as comparing allocated lunch time. The determination of the amount of food waste in the selected countries was carried out mainly by weighing and photographing dishes. Also, in some countries, studies have been conducted on food waste in schools, to determine which foods are often thrown away. Overall, this systematic review highlights the importance of measures to reduce food waste in schools.

Contribution:
Beisbekova A.K. – concept and design of the study, editing, approval of the final version of the article, data collection;
Shukenova M.Z. – writing the text.
All authors are responsible for the integrity of all parts of the manuscript and approval of the manuscript final version.

Conflict of interest. The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Funding. The study had no sponsorship.

Received: August 2, 2024 / Revised: May 23, 2025 / Accepted: June 26, 2025 / Published: August 20, 2025

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