It is 9:00 p.m. at a supermarket in Barcelona or Valencia. A group of thirteen neighbors patiently waits for the supermarket workers to take out the bags containing the day’s leftover food and place them inside rectangular organic waste containers located at street level. Gradually, some neighbors open the bags and, in an organized manner, rummage through the food they find inside to quickly and efficiently distribute the foods that have been selected and discarded for unknown reasons.
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Starting tomorrow, April 3, 2026, the law on the prevention of food loss and waste comes into effect. The new regulation, published a year ago and applied gradually to allow affected parties time to adapt, foresees the implementation of prevention plans aimed at minimizing food waste in companies that are part of the food chain.
The law requires having a plan for the prevention and reduction of food waste and residues
All companies participating in the food chain, except micro-enterprises and small agricultural holdings, must design these new documents to identify critical points where food losses occur, as well as establish measures to minimize them, through a legal hierarchy that prioritizes human consumption and donation to social entities before products end up discarded.
The obligation to prepare this plan will apply to all companies with an area greater than 1,300 m², both individually and under the same tax identification code, to design the prevention plan. Compliance will be mandatory for food chains, factories, suppliers, hospitality, restaurants, public administration, and non-profit organizations.
The regulation marks a before and after; it comes to bring order where there was none before”
Juan Ángel Martín
General Director of Comerso
For Juan Ángel Martín, general director of Comerso, an intermediary company between supermarket chains and entities that facilitate food donation, “the regulation marks a before and after; it comes to bring order where there was none before.” Still, Martín highlights that “we are still in a phase of awareness among the affected sectors.”
This executive positively values the introduction of the sanctioning regime, a year after its publication, as he believes it can help prevent waste of residues and food “due to the very fear of sanctions, as well as their reputational consequences.” “If tomorrow morning a photo comes out with a specific supermarket with people collecting food from the trash, any Autonomous Community will be obliged to sanction it.”
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Nuria de Pedraza, member of the Association of Large Consumer Goods Companies in Spain and director of the project Food Has No Waste, states that it is still awaited to see exactly how the sanctioning regime will be applied. “Each autonomous community will decide how inspections will be carried out” and, above all, “from which department, since the current wording may lead to unequal interpretations of the law.” Still, she assures that she is aware of meetings between autonomous communities and the Government “to try to agree on some minimum common instructions.”
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The law has acceptance and consensus from distribution companies, supermarkets, and social entities
Anna Peña, spokesperson for Rezero, an NGO that promotes waste reduction and reuse that participated in the social campaign #LeySinDesperdicio, positively values “the introduction of the obligation of plans for companies,” since “many times there has been an excess of blaming citizens in waste management campaigns or, for example, recycling.” Still, the spokesperson for the entity is cautious: “In waste management policies, their application is often left to the will of the actors involved.”
Furthermore, everything seems to indicate that the business sector also positively values the application of the law. “We share the objectives of the law,” says Ignacio García, general director of Asedas, one of the main associations of the food distribution and supermarket employers’ association in the state. García highlights that his is one of the sectors where the least food waste occurs. “We do not foresee any problems in applying the law in the sector,” he adds. “All distribution companies have had a culture of donation implemented for many years.”
The new law foresees fines of up to 500,000 euros in case of repeated violations (Visual explainer)
The new sanctioning regime foresees warnings or fines up to 2,000 euros for minor offenses, for example, not donating products to foundations and wasting them; up to 60,000 euros for serious offenses, such as not having a prevention and reduction plan; and up to 500,000 euros for very serious offenses, that is, in the repetition of the previous offenses.
According to the latest report from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, 1.125 billion kilos of food were wasted in 2024
Food waste does not only occur in supermarkets, although this is often the most visible part for the consumer. According to the latest report from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, published in August 2025, during 2024, 1.125 billion kilos/liters of food were wasted. That is 24.38 kilos/liters per person per year. This is a figure 4.4% lower than the previous year. A loss that, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), can be reduced if proper prevention plans are applied.
As social entities and associations such as Aecoc point out, the law on the prevention of food loss and waste arrives ten years later than its counterparts in neighboring countries. France approved in February 2016 the so-called Garot Law, a regulation that required supermarkets larger than 400 m² to donate leftover food that was still suitable for human consumption.
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