Are you a food waster?
Most of us think we are pretty good at not wasting food, then quietly bin a fridge full of soggy spinach every other Sunday. This 60-second food waste quiz scores your kitchen habits across eight things that genuinely predict how much food a household ends up throwing away, and gives you a couple of tips you can actually use.
Find out how much food you actually waste.
Eight questions. About 60 seconds. No sign-up, no email. You will get a persona, a score out of 24, and a few tips tailored to where you are now.
8 questions
What this quiz actually measures
Self-reported food waste is notoriously unreliable. Most people, asked outright, will tell you they waste very little, then bin a quarter of their weekly shop without registering it. The honest way to estimate household food waste is to ask about the underlying habits instead, because those habits predict the binning behaviour pretty reliably.
The eight questions in this quiz are pulled from the behavioural predictors that WRAP's research and academic studies (notably Soma et al. 2022 and Romani et al.) keep returning to: pre-shop checking, list-making, multi-buy discipline, date-label literacy, use-up cooking, leftovers fate, bread storage, and an honest self-report of how often food gets thrown away. Each answer is worth zero to three points. Total it up and the score lands you in one of four personas.
What your result means
Four tiers, scored out of 24. They are deliberately a bit playful, but the bands are calibrated against the spread of behaviours WRAP sees across UK households.
Score 0 to 7
The Optimist
You assume you will get to it. The good news is most households start here and the easy wins are easy.
Score 8 to 13
The Average Household
You do some of the right things, just not consistently. Small upgrades have an outsized payoff.
Score 14 to 19
The Conscious Cook
Solid habits. The next level is making them automatic rather than reinventing them.
Score 20 to 24
The Zero Waste Pro
Top tier. Genuinely well done. Best move from here is dragging a friend up the scoreboard with you.
How to score higher next time you take the quiz
The good news about household food waste is that the habits that fix it are small, cheap and well-evidenced. Pick one and try it for a week before adding another.
- 1
Glance in the fridge before you write the list.
Thirty seconds prevents the most common cause of household waste, which is duplicate buying. A pantry app turns this into a phone glance.
- 2
Write the list, take it with you, stick to it.
List-making is the single behaviour most consistently linked to lower waste in the research.
- 3
Decode the date labels once and for all.
Use by means safety, do not eat it after. Best before is quality, food is usually fine well past the date if it looks and smells right.
- 4
Pick a regular use-up night.
Friday-night stir fry, Sunday frittata, soup-and-toastie Wednesday. Romani et al. found a use-up-day intervention cut waste 24%.
- 5
Treat the freezer as a pause button.
Bread, half-tins, herbs, ripe bananas, leftover rice. Almost anything freezes.
- 6
Set an expiry reminder for the trickier items.
Yoghurt, opened jars, hummus, fresh herbs. A two-day-out nudge catches the ones that hide at the back of the fridge.
Foodat does the three highest-scoring habits automatically.
Scan a grocery receipt and your pantry inventory builds itself. Get a heads-up two or three days before anything is about to expire. Get AI recipes built from the ingredients sitting in your kitchen, prioritised by what is closest to going off. Free on iPhone.
Get Foodat, free on iOSHow the scoring works
Each of the eight questions has four answers worth zero, one, two or three points. The maximum score is 24. The personas are defined by score range. The Optimist sits at zero to seven, the Average Household at eight to thirteen, the Conscious Cook at fourteen to nineteen, and the Zero Waste Pro at twenty to twenty-four.
The bands were calibrated against the rough distribution of self-reported household waste behaviour in WRAP's Household Food Management Survey. They are intended as friendly guidance, not a scientific diagnosis. If you score in the lower tiers, the tips you get are the highest-leverage interventions for that band, based on the evidence.
Sources: WRAP UK Food Waste & Surplus Key Facts (Jul 2025), Soma et al., 2022 (RCT), Romani et al., 2023 (use-up-day intervention), Food Standards Agency on date labels.
Frequently asked questions
- What does this food waste quiz actually measure? +
- Eight specific habits that WRAP and other food-waste researchers have linked to how much edible food a household ends up binning. The questions cover whether you check the fridge before shopping, whether you write a shopping list, how you respond to multi-buys, how well you know date labels, how often you cook use-up meals, what happens to leftovers, how you store bread, and how often you actually throw food out.
- Is the quiz scientifically accurate? +
- It is not a clinical instrument. It is a quick behavioural snapshot built on the same predictors that show up in WRAP's behaviour-change research and in peer-reviewed studies like Soma et al. (2022). The scoring tells you, broadly, how your habits compare to most households, and the persona points you at the highest-leverage thing to fix first.
- How long does the quiz take? +
- About sixty seconds. Eight questions, no sign-up, no email, no data stored on a server. You can restart it as many times as you like.
- What does each persona mean? +
- Four tiers. The Optimist (0 to 7) lands where most households quietly sit. The Average Household (8 to 13) does some of the right things but inconsistently. The Conscious Cook (14 to 19) has solid habits and small upgrades left to find. The Zero Waste Pro (20 to 24) is genuinely in the top tier of households.
- Can I share my result? +
- Yes. The share button uses your phone's native share sheet, or copies a one-line summary to your clipboard if you are on desktop.
- How do I actually waste less food? +
- Three habits do most of the work. Know what is in your kitchen before you go shopping, plan one or two meals a week around things you already have, and track use-by dates so older items get eaten first. Foodat automates all three on iPhone.
- Is this quiz UK or US? +
- Both. The questions are generic, and the surrounding stats reference WRAP for the UK and ReFED and the EPA for the US. The advice applies either side of the Atlantic.