Why Food‐Waste Strategies Stall: Decision Procedures for Environmental Management in Food‐System Firms

Reducing food waste is a common corporate sustainability goal, yet firms continue to generate avoidable waste despite setting targets and investing in measurement systems. Using 19 cases from a study of 22 interviews across 20 food‐system firms, we examined the tools used and how waste‐relevant decisions were made. More successful implementation followed an ‘embedded translation pathway’, where priorities were supported by clear procedures at operational decision windows. These comprised routing defaults that prioritised destinations for surplus food; threshold rules that linked specified conditions to actions; and lightweight optimisation that selected among options within defined constraints. Stalled implementation exhibited an ‘erosion chain’ linking information decay, loss of trust in tools and metrics, and constraints encoded in tools and routines. These findings help explain why adoption of environmental management tools often fails to change operational practices, and help managers identify where waste prevention is feasible and where only improved diversion is achievable.