People are throwing away less food, buying fewer takeaways and taking risks with “use by” dates, according to the Food Standards Agency’s first Covid-19 consumer tracker reports. The surveys, involving more than 2,000 adults and run by Ipsos Mori, are designed to help the Agency understand everything from food insecurity and changing consumption patterns to…

Sales of spices like turmeric and ginger have increased during the Covid-19 pandemic as consumers seek out ingredients that will boost their immune system. “With the coronavirus there has been a surge in interest in food and ingredients related to immunity,” Julian Mellentin, director at consultancy New Nutrition Business, told The FT. US sales of…

European consumers are happy to cut down on meat consumption but the products they favour as replacements might come as a surprise. Just over 40% of consumers from 11 EU countries (not including the UK) have either stopped eating red meat or cut down due to “environmental concerns”, according to a survey of 11,000 people…

Support for carbon labelling of products continues to grow, according to research published by YouGov and The Carbon Trust. The February/March 2020 poll of 2,071 adults in the UK showed that 35% of UK consumers now feel it is important to know that a brand they are buying is “taking action to reduce the product’s…

Over 400 cases of food fraud relating to the beef supply chain took place in the past twenty years, according to new analysis. The paper published in the Food Control journal monitored alerts from the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) and HorizonScan databases between 1997 and 2017. It found 413 incidents of…

The government has published new guidance setting out how a range of food businesses should continue to function during the coronavirus lockdown. Supermarkets have recently put in place policies to avoid a repeat of scenes from March where crowds of shoppers stripped shelves of vital supplies. New retailer measures supported by the government include limiting…

Shoppers are unknowingly eating more than 70g of wild fish for every 100g of farmed fish they consume from UK supermarkets, an investigation has found. Consumers indirectly ate 177,000 tonnes of wild fish in 2019 by purchasing farmed seafood products including salmon and prawns that have been fed on fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO), according…

The UK’s largest grocer has told suppliers that it doesn’t want compostable packaging being used, including polylactic acid (PLA). Tesco uses a simple traffic light system to inform suppliers about the packaging materials and formats it wants and doesn’t want. Those on the red list are “not to be used as customers cannot easily recycle…

M&S will extend its refill trial to a second store following positive customer feedback. The retailer revealed this week that 25 out of the 44 products available through a Fill Your Own pilot at its Hedge End store in Southampton are selling higher volumes than the packaged alternatives. M&S plans to extend the Fill Your…