France’s Food Waste Law: What Supermarkets Must Do

France's Food-Waste Campaign and the Law Behind the Headline

France became the first country to legally stop large supermarkets from throwing away or deliberately spoiling unsold food that is still fit to eat. The binding rules came in a law passed in February 2016: shops of 400 square metres or more must offer edible unsold food to charities through signed donation agreements, rather than binning it or pouring bleach over it to stop people foraging.

The campaign that pushed the issue into the headlines in 2015 was led by Arash Derambarsh, a municipal councillor in Courbevoie, a suburb west of Paris, who then set out to take the idea abroad. This is the story of that campaign, what the law really requires, what it did not achieve, and what households can do without waiting for legislation.

How a local councillor turned food waste into a national issue

Derambarsh began in his own town by asking a local supermarket to hand unsold products to people in need, then launched an online petition demanding a national ban on supermarket food waste. It gathered roughly 210,000 signatures and drew support from well-known French public figures. He told The Guardian that it was “scandalous and absurd” for edible food to be destroyed while poor, homeless and unemployed people went hungry.

His own experience was part of the pitch. He said that as a law student he lived on very little after paying rent, ate one proper meal a day and knew how hard it is to study while worrying about the next meal. Critics called him naive; he answered that caring about hungry people was the reason he had entered local politics in the first place.

In spring 2015 an amendment against supermarket food waste was attached to the broad economic reform package known as the Loi Macron. That first attempt did not become the lasting legal basis. The rules that stuck came the following year through a dedicated bill.

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What the 2016 French food waste law actually requires

The law of 11 February 2016, often called the Garot law after Guillaume Garot, the former food minister who carried the bill, was approved unanimously by the Senate after passing the lower house. Its main points for large retailers are:

No deliberate destruction. Supermarkets of 400 m² or more may not destroy unsold food that is still edible, including products close to their best-before date, and may not make it unfit to eat on purpose.
Donation agreements. These stores must sign agreements with food banks or charities so that surplus food can be collected.
An order of priority. Waste should first be prevented, then surplus donated to people, then used for animal feed, and only after that composted or turned into energy.
Penalties. Reports at the time cited fines of up to €75,000 for breaches.

The law also asked schools to teach children about food and waste. Later French legislation in 2018 and 2020 widened donation duties beyond supermarkets to parts of the catering and food industries.

What the law does not do

It does not force charities to accept everything; they can turn down food they cannot store or distribute safely. It does not cover small shops below the size threshold, and it does not touch household waste, which is where most food is thrown away. A slogan such as “France banned food waste” is therefore much bigger than the legal reality.

Why this matters: the scale of food waste

When the campaign began, The Guardian reported that France was discarding about 7.1 million tonnes of food a year, with roughly two thirds coming from consumers, 15% from restaurants and 11% from shops. French government figures from the same period put the cost at around €400 per household per year.

Worldwide, a widely cited 2011 study for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that about a third of food produced for people, around 1.3 billion tonnes, is lost or wasted each year. Newer measurements by the UN Environment Programme estimated food waste alone at about 931 million tonnes in 2019, with households responsible for around 61% of it. Meanwhile, at the time of Derambarsh’s campaign the UN World Food Programme estimated that about 805 million people did not have enough to eat. Hunger is not only a rural problem in poor countries: low-wage workers and homeless people in rich nations face it too.

Waste also has a climate cost. Food that is grown, transported and refrigerated only to be thrown away carries all the emissions of its production, and rotting food in landfills releases methane. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 aims to halve per-person food waste at retail and consumer level by 2030.

Taking the idea beyond France

Derambarsh’s ambition was global. In 2015 he planned to promote the idea through ONE, the anti-poverty campaign co-founded by the singer Bono, at the United Nations meetings on the new development goals in September, at the G20 summit in Turkey in November and at the COP21 climate conference in Paris that December.

In explaining his mission, he told The Guardian: “Food is the basis of life, it is an elementary factor in our existence.” Other countries have since followed with their own approaches. Italy, for instance, passed a law in 2016 that encourages donation mainly through incentives and simpler rules rather than fines, and campaigners in several countries have pushed for similar measures.

Credit, controversy and the campaigner’s later story

Laws are rarely the work of one person. Guillaume Garot, charities and food banks had been working on food waste for years, and French media such as Libération questioned how much credit Derambarsh deserved. Garot himself publicly criticised what he saw as the councillor’s appetite for media attention.

Derambarsh’s later career was also troubled. In 2020 the Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne university annulled the law doctorate he had received in 2015 amid plagiarism allegations, and the Paris bar expelled him in 2021; the Paris Court of Appeal upheld that decision in December 2023. None of this changes what the 2016 law says, but it is a useful reminder to judge a reform on its content rather than on the reputation of its best-known champion.

Food banks themselves welcomed the law. Jacques Bailet, head of the French food bank network Banques Alimentaires, said it would improve the quality and variety of what they receive, including scarce items such as meat, fruit and vegetables.

Has it worked?

Donations from supermarkets to French food banks rose after 2016, and the law became a reference point in European debates. But supermarkets were only ever a small slice of total waste, and charities have reported problems with the quality of some donations, such as products arriving too close to their dates to be distributed in time. The honest summary is that the law helped redirect surplus food from large shops to people in need, while the bigger task of reducing waste at home and on farms remains.

What you can do at home

Since households throw away the largest share, the most effective changes start in your own kitchen:

Plan and list. Check the fridge before shopping and buy what you will actually cook that week.
Know the labels. “Use by” is about safety; “best before” is about quality, and many foods are fine after that date if stored well.
Store smarter. Put older items at the front, freeze bread, leftovers and ripe fruit before they spoil.
Cook with what is left. Soups, omelettes, stir-fries and smoothies use up odds and ends.
Share surplus. Food-sharing apps, community fridges and local food banks accept many unopened products.

For a related story about waste and recycling, see Sweden’s waste-to-energy story beyond the garbage headline.

Sources: Global Agriculture: France passes food-waste law (8 February 2016); Wikipedia: Arash Derambarsh; Wikipedia: Food loss and waste; The Guardian: interview with Arash Derambarsh (25 May 2015). Story first reported by True Activist; reaction GIF via reactiongifs.

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