July 22, 2025
In this post: 20% Increase in Unsold Food During Summer | Why Does Wasted Food Increase in Summer | What Businesses Can Do to Reduce Waste | The Trusted Diversion Solution
Summary: New 2024 data from Divert shows a 20% increase in unsold food during the summer versus the winter. This post explores why unsold food increases in the summer and what food companies can do to address it.
Divert data analysts have found a significant increase in unsold food during the summer months, with summer volumes measuring over 20% higher than the winter.
As food companies across the supply chain seek operational excellence and resilience amidst market changes, preventing and reducing waste is a crucial step. This post explores the key factors driving the summertime increase in unsold food, as well as solutions for companies to address them.
Why Does So Much More Food Go to Waste in the Summer?
It is more challenging for food businesses across the supply chain – from manufacturers and distributors to wholesalers, retailers, and food service – to manage their unsold food during the warmer months for a few reasons:
- Peak season for perishable products. Summer is the time when more perishable items are being distributed through the supply chain, such as fresh produce like tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, and stone fruits.
- Changing consumer behavior in the summer months. From backyard barbecues to al-fresco dining to music festivals, consumer demand for fresh, high-quality produce surges in the warmer months. Food businesses source more product to meet this demand, but determining real-time and accurate quantities is always a challenge.
- Extreme heat driven by climate change. Already in 2025, the U.S. has experienced multiple record-breaking heat waves, along with supply-chain disruptions as a result of flooding and other extreme weather events. As these extreme weather events become more frequent in more regions of the country due to climate change, the margin of error for mishandling food increases significantly. Those perishable items that are in higher demand during the summer months often lose their freshness faster than other types of food, and the hotter it is outside, the less time businesses in the supply chain – farmers, manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and grocers – have to move that food before it is no longer fresh or safe to consume.
What Can Food Industry Companies Do to Prevent & Reduce Waste in the Summer:
Food businesses already face instability year-round, from fluctuations in commodity pricing, to changes in trade policy, to overseas conflicts that halt supply chains. With the added complexity of seasonal fluctuations from consumer behavior and the environmental effects of climate change, it is more important than ever for businesses to build operational resilience. Here are few key steps your business can take to prevent food from going to waste in the summer months:
- Seek greater visibility through actionable data. Leverage technologies that provide visibility into your waste trends through waste audits and reporting to help your team make data-driven decisions around production and inventory management to prevent and reduce waste.
- Right-size your waste with holistic diversion strategies. The right diversion provider will partner with you across measurement, strategy, and execution to maximize markdown and donation opportunities for edible food before sending inedible food to its best and highest use. Innovative collaborations like Divert’s partnership with Feeding America are helping grocery retailers donate more edible food and divert unsold, non-donatable food from the landfill.
- Protect your brand with secure, certified destruction. High volumes of branded products going to a landfill or landfill alternative can be a liability for your company. Working with a partner that can provide certificates of destruction, along with photo evidence, volume data, and other documentation, can help your business reduce risk, prepare for audits, and measure your sustainable impact.
- Stabilize your operations with circular solutions like anaerobic digestion. Organic waste streams often require extra handling to be accepted by certain management solutions. Processes like grinding, depackaging, storage, and staging can be resource-intensive, adding to operational stress. Some industrial companies such as manufacturers and distributors are minimizing this complexity by adopting a circular solution such as anaerobic digestion for its ability to accept wasted food as generated, reduce the costs of managing waste streams and simplify their compliance with regulations.
The Trusted Solution for Waste Diversion: Divert
With 18 years of experience, Divert is the leader in managing unsold food and food byproducts. Trusted by the nation’s leading food companies, we’re helping businesses across the supply chain adapt to changing market conditions and build resiliency.
- Our solutions are simple and integrate seamlessly with your existing operations to keep your team focused on what you do best: producing, distributing, and selling fresh food. These capabilities include depackaging, scheduling, reverse logistics, and transportation support where available.
- We handle complexity with care. We accept a wide variety of materials (from commingled slurries to line casualties to large recalls of fully packaged products and more), and we offer secure, certified destruction with support for even the most demanding confidentiality requirements.
- We provide insights to drive better decision-making, right-size your waste over time, optimize donation and diversion efforts, and understand how regulations are impacting the business.
- We provide transparent documentation. We provide certificates of destruction as well as ancillary documentation to enable regulatory compliance and sustainability impact reports summarizing the environmental benefits achieved through our process.
- We help you make an immediate and lasting impact. Our anaerobic digestion process transforms unconsumed, non-donatable food products and organic byproducts into renewable natural gas to power local communities, reducing dependence on petroleum-derived energy.
- We’re scaling nationwide infrastructure to be within 100 miles of 80% of the U.S. population.
To date, we’ve helped our customers prevent more than 3.2 billion pounds of unconsumed, non-donatable food and organic byproducts from going to waste, and we’re scaling rapidly to serve your business across the United States. Whether you’re a manufacturer, distributor, storage company, wholesaler, or grocery retailer, we have the diversion solutions to help you achieve your business goals. Contact us to learn more about our solutions today.
