Whole Foods Market are on course to discard about 253,000 tonnes of material in 2026 (559 million pounds), counting everything that leaves their stores and facilities as rubbish, recycling or compost.
That number appears in none of their impact reports. It comes entirely from two numbers that do.
Whole Foods lead with a percentage rather than a tonnage. Nearly 73% of what they discarded in 2025 stayed out of landfill, and the same arithmetic puts 258,900 tonnes on the loading dock with 69,900 tonnes of it in the ground.
Whole Foods waste year by year (2022 to 2025)
Three figures show up in the waste section of every Whole Foods impact report. The tonnes of unsold food sent to composting and other organic waste routes, the tonnes of recyclable material sent to recycling, and one overall diversion rate.
Their own definition of that rate is what makes the total recoverable. It is "the percent of all discarded materials being diverted from landfill or incineration through pathways like recycling or composting".
So the diverted tonnage divided by the rate gives everything they threw out. Whole Foods print both halves of that sum and never the answer.
The four years Whole Foods have reported this way look like this.
| Year | Diversion rate | Total discarded (tonnes) |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | nearly 73% | 258,900 |
| 2024 | nearly 70% | 281,000 |
| 2023 | nearly 70% | 270,700 |
| 2022 | 72.3% | 294,900 |
Note: The rates are Whole Foods' own, most recently in their 2025 impact report. Their reports use US short tons, converted here at 0.907 tonnes each.
Behind each rate sits a diverted tonnage, being 189,000 in 2025, 196,700 in 2024, 189,500 in 2023 and 213,200 in 2022. Each total above is that year's diverted tonnage divided by that year's rate.
The 2026 figure is a projection. It takes the 2025 total, adds the 2% store growth their announced openings imply and applies the 4% a year fall in waste per store seen since 2022, which lands it between 246,000 and 264,000 tonnes.
Why this total is a floor rather than a ceiling
Two of the three inputs are rounded in the company's favour. Both tonnages carry a plus sign, so they are minimums, and the rate is given as "nearly" 73%, meaning the real rate is slightly below it.
A lower rate makes the total higher. At 72% rather than 73%, 2025 comes out at 262,400 tonnes instead of 258,900.
The years are not quite like for like
Whole Foods have changed what the report covers. The 2022 edition described stores and facilities in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, while the 2025 edition states it reflects North American stores, facilities and operations unless it says otherwise.
Total discards are down 36,000 tonnes, or 12%, since 2022, and the store count rose over the same stretch. Almost all of that fall sits in the food half.
What Whole Foods is and what these figures cover
Whole Foods Market opened in Austin, Texas in 1980 and built a national chain on organic and natural food. Amazon bought them in 2017 for about 13.7 billion dollars, and they now sit inside Amazon's Worldwide Grocery Stores business.
Four numbers give the scale behind the tonnage.
- About 543 stores in North America. Worked back from the 521 stores with composting programmes that the 2025 report calls nearly 96% of all locations.
- Over 100,000 team members, per the 2025 letter from chief executive Jason Buechel.
- 22.6 billion dollars of sales. That is Amazon's "Physical stores" line for 2025, which also holds Amazon Fresh and Go, and excludes grocery ordered online.
- Twelve stores in the United Kingdom by June 2026, double the six they had, after opening six in London between April and June.
The boundary matters as much as the number. These figures cover what the stores and facilities throw out, so they exclude the packaging customers bin at home, everything upstream in the supply chain, and the UK stores from 2025 onward.
Nine tonnes of discards leave the average store every week
A national total is hard to picture, so it helps to bring it down to one shop and one week.
| Year | Per store each year (tonnes) | Per store each week (tonnes) |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 477 | 9.2 |
| 2024 | 520 | 10.0 |
| 2023 | 506 | 9.7 |
| 2022 | 554 | 10.7 |
Note: Store counts are derived from the percentages in each report, since Whole Foods only state a total store count in the 2022 edition. Their own denominators disagree slightly from page to page.
Of those 9.2 tonnes in 2025, roughly 2.5 tonnes went to landfill or an incinerator. The rest was composted, fed to animals or recycled.
Waste per store has fallen 14% since 2022. That is the clearest sign in the data that something real is happening, because it holds even as the chain opens shops.
Unsold food is the falling half of the pile
The food waste half has moved fast. Organic diversion went from 98,000 tonnes in 2022 to 75,600 tonnes in 2025, a fall of 23%, while the number of stores running those programmes climbed from 449 to 521.
Whole Foods describe the approach as decrease, donate, divert. The decrease part is where a tonnage actually disappears, and they credit tighter ordering plus repurposing produce that fails display standards into prepared foods.
Two discount programmes catch what is left before it becomes waste.
- Too Good To Go, the surplus-food app, ran in 534 US stores and kept the equivalent of over 1.5 million meals from being wasted in 2025.
- Enjoy Today, their own same-day-expiry discount, reaches 507 stores and kept 4.2 million items out of landfill in its first year, 2024.
What cannot be sold or given away gets routed. Composting, animal feed and anaerobic digestion take the bulk of it today.
The next step is machinery. In December 2025 Whole Foods and Mill Industries announced that from 2027 stores will grind and dehydrate fruit and vegetable scraps on site, into a dry ingredient meant for the chicken feed their own egg suppliers use.
One number shows how far the food half could still go. In a pilot with the waste company Divert across 35 stores, Whole Foods reported a 94% food waste diversion rate inside seven months, up 22% on those stores' own earlier performance.
Recyclable material has barely moved in four years
The recycling line is the stubborn one. It was 115,200 tonnes in 2022 and 113,400 tonnes in 2025, a change of under 2% across four years, and it is now the larger of the two halves.
Whole Foods do not break that tonnage down, so what is inside it can only be inferred from the programmes they describe. Those are almost all about corrugated cardboard and checkout bags.
The two programmes they do put numbers on
Reusable crates are the bigger lever. A pilot with IFCO at their Cheshire, Connecticut distribution centre avoided 155,000 pounds of cardboard in 90 days, and in 2025 the programme kept over 400 tonnes of single-use packaging out of circulation.
Checkout bags are the visible one. A stronger twist-handle bag meant 50.7 million fewer paper bags in 2025, up from 20.6 million avoided the year before.
Where a voluntary tonnage becomes a legal one
Packaging is also where a voluntary number turns into a legal one. Where extended producer responsibility rules apply, a company has to report the weight and material of the packaging it puts on the market and pay a fee on it.
That is why packaging EPR data tends to be sharper than a sustainability report. A grocer expanding in Britain runs into pEPR, where the fee is set per tonne and per material, so the tonnage has to be right rather than round.
The donated food that never enters the waste count
Donated food sits outside every figure above, because Whole Foods do not treat it as discarded. In 2025 they gave 31,374,598 pounds of food, over 26 million meals, to more than 1,000 food rescue and redistribution programmes.
That is 14,200 tonnes of edible food that left the stores unsold. Add it to the total and 2025 becomes 273,100 tonnes of food and material Whole Foods handled and did not sell.
For sector scale, ReFED put total US surplus food at 70 million tons in 2024, with retail responsible for 5.7% of it, so roughly 3.6 million tonnes. Whole Foods' own organic diversion that year was 83,500 tonnes.
Those two counts are built differently, so the ratio is indicative rather than exact. ReFED's includes donations and inedible parts across the whole sector, while the Whole Foods figure is only what their stores sent to composting and similar routes.
What Whole Foods say about their own numbers
The headline commitment is a halving. Through membership of ReFED and the World Wildlife Fund's US Food Waste Pact, Whole Foods say they have "solidified our commitment to an ambitious goal: reducing our food waste by 50% by 2030".
A halving target with no baseline
No baseline sits next to that goal. None of the four reports names a baseline year or a baseline tonnage, so nobody outside the company can measure the halving against anything.
Their food figures do move in the right direction, and the target is the part that cannot be checked rather than the effort behind it.
The rate that has not moved
The diversion rate tells a flatter story than the tonnage does. It was 72.3% in 2022, nearly 70% in each of the next two years, and nearly 73% in 2025, which is less than a point of movement in four years.
Whole Foods say themselves that the rate is not a clean measure of their work.
Their 2023 report notes that "widespread waste industry data challenges and the counterbalancing effects of improving our data integrity mean that our efforts and accomplishments aren't always reflected in our overall diversion rate".
The plastic baseline they built and did not publish
Packaging shows the same pattern of a number built and not shared. In 2025 they finished a plastic footprint calculation with Amazon, described as "the benchmark against which all reduction initiatives are measured", and the baseline itself was not published.
The measurement work behind it is real. They reached 75% packaging data coverage by sales volume across their own brands and food service items, capturing more than 40 data points for every packaging component.
Frequently asked questions about Whole Foods waste
These are the questions readers ask most about Whole Foods and waste, answered from the company's own published figures.
How much waste does Whole Foods produce each year?
About 258,900 tonnes in 2025, and roughly 253,000 tonnes projected for 2026. The figure covers everything discarded at their stores and facilities, and it is derived from the diverted tonnage and diversion rate Whole Foods publish.
Does Whole Foods publish a total waste figure?
No. They publish the tonnage diverted through composting, the tonnage diverted through recycling, and an overall diversion rate. Dividing the first two by the third gives the total, which they leave unstated.
How much of Whole Foods' waste goes to landfill?
About 69,900 tonnes in 2025, or roughly 2.5 tonnes a week from an average store. That is the 27% or so of discarded material that their diversion rate does not cover.
What kind of waste does Whole Foods produce most of?
Recyclable material, at 113,400 tonnes in 2025 against 75,600 tonnes of unsold food. The recycling line is not broken down, though the programmes Whole Foods describe point mostly at cardboard.
Has Whole Foods cut its food waste?
Yes, on their own numbers. Unsold food sent to organic diversion fell 23% between 2022 and 2025, and waste per store fell 14%, both while the chain grew.
Does Whole Foods have a food waste target?
They have committed to cutting food waste 50% by 2030 through ReFED and the WWF US Food Waste Pact. No baseline year or baseline tonnage is published, so progress toward it cannot be checked from outside.
How much food does Whole Foods donate?
31,374,598 pounds in 2025, which they value at over 26 million meals and about 14,200 tonnes. Donated food is not counted as waste or as diversion, so it sits outside the totals on this page.
How does Whole Foods compare with Amazon?
They are part of Amazon, so the figures nest rather than compete. The best-known number for Amazon's waste is a plastic packaging estimate built from parcel volume, while this page counts what grocery stores put in bins.
Images: Ajay Suresh
