Mr. Kevin O'Donoghue:

The date issue is an interesting one. It is an education piece around the terms "use by" and "best before" that was causing problems previously. We worked with the retail action group, which was most of the major retailers in the State. I am sure the members will have seen in supermarkets a push to have as much food as possible used, even by slashing prices and putting it into designated areas, so as to minimise the food waste in supermarkets. Many of the bigger chains are partnered up with the likes of Food Cloud so there are charitable donations and donations to local communities through that. Obviously, we would like to see that continue but the impact of what we are trying to do with the roadmap is to ensure that there is not enough food in the system causing the need for it to be dealt with at the back end like that. Each stage of the process will be examined to see where the major losses are happening, and to see what can be done to ensure, from a policy perspective, that we are minimising the amount of waste being generated in the first place. Then we will look to deal with the materials that are left, as holistically as possible. If the food can be used, eaten or distributed, this is a far better use of it than putting it to composting or anaerobic digestion.