Mr. Brian Quirke:

The national food waste prevention roadmap has a specific basket of actions around food redistribution and donation. Among the actions that we have committed to undertake are as follows:

- Investigate the potential impact of a prohibition on the destruction of edible food in advance of its ‘use by’ date.

- Investigate the regulatory and legal barriers to ‘Good Samaritan’ acts of donation and whether mandatory donation of edible food from retail outlets would reduce food waste.

- Using the EPA’s Food Waste Charter, support a voluntary target with retailers and the processing industry for a percentage of edible food to be donated.

There is still work to be carried out in looking at the regulatory barriers to understand exactly what are the barriers so this can inform further policy in this area.