London food waste campaign evaluation

This invitation to tender (ITT) is for the development and delivery of a robust monitoring and evaluation approach for a new London food waste campaign. We would like to understand the impact of (a) a 'London-wide' (across 17 boroughs) food waste campaign; and (b) boosted hyper-local communications using the campaign's creative approach in a small number of targeted London neighbourhoods.

Simpler Recycling legislation is designed to ensure the consistent collection of materials and food from every workplace (from March 2025) and household (from March 2026) in England. Defra has a long-term ambition to reach a 65% municipal recycling rate by 2035. As the food waste service - now mandated to be provided to every household across England - will be new to many residents, communications on food waste recycling is a key focus and we need to ensure that any communications on the topic are robustly evaluated.

Across all local authorities in the UK, 79% of food waste is disposed of in residual waste and only 17% in food waste recycling1. This issue is driven by barriers such as a lack of knowledge about what constitutes food waste, hygiene concerns, and limited understanding of the benefits and processes of food waste recycling.

While residents look to their council to provide the detailed "how" of using their local waste collection services, ReLondon's new campaign aims to support this by focusing on the "why" - using messages and creatives which motivate the uptake of food waste recycling (as well as broader messaging on waste prevention) in line with council service implementation.

ReLondon has in recent years run a sustainable food campaign, Eat like a Londoner, which focused on waste prevention and sustainable diets. This ended in April 2025, having achieved year-on-year improvements in engagement and claimed behaviour change. Previous work and evaluation will be shared with the successful supplier. The new food waste campaign will instead focus on food waste recycling (and food waste prevention to a lesser degree), in order to support the roll-out of Simpler Recycling and practical shifts in how boroughs manage waste; and it will not include any diet messaging. It will be run centrally by ReLondon for the first year, culminating in a learning toolkit for boroughs to continue using locally beyond that first year.

Building on Eat like a Londoner, in partnership with and funded by 17 boroughs across London, ReLondon will develop and deliver the new campaign in particular to improve food waste recycling uptake and food waste prevention behaviours amongst younger Londoners (21-44) and families with children under 11 (as the highest food wasters). These groupings will be the main target of the London-wide campaign's paid media.

The hyper-localised campaign will be aimed at selected neighbourhoods where there may be a large majority of the target audience mentioned above. ReLondon will additionally be focusing for the hyper-local campaign on a set of overlaid demographics as follows:

Young people (21-34-year-olds) living in shared housing

People living in purpose-built flats and tower blocks (with communal collections)

People of diverse ethnicities and food cultures

Households on lower incomes

ReLondon is currently working with boroughs to gather additional demographic information to help to indicate which neighbourhoods would have high densities of our target audiences. We will continue to work both with boroughs and with the appointed contractor to select and confirm potential target groups and neighbourhoods as the project progresses.

The following specification sets out the requirements to ensure robust evaluation of the London-wide campaign as well as the hyper-local campaign, to ensure that learnings can be gathered about their success and relative performance against a number of different KPIs.

The evaluation will assess the success of ReLondon's food waste communications campaign in improving motivation to recycle amongst 21-34 year olds and families with children under 11. It will also assess the impact of the boosted, hyper-local campaign focused on selected London neighbourhoods based on an additional overlaid set of target demographics (see section 2.1 above).

The overarching aims of the evaluation are to:

Gather evidence using a robust evaluation methodology (experimental or quasi-experimental methods), to measure the impact of both the London-wide and hyper-local communications campaigns on food waste recycling and prevention.

Provide impact data and learnings for the 17 London funder boroughs on improvements in motivation, knowledge and consideration of relevant food waste-related behaviours, to support them in continuing to use campaign assets effectively beyond the first year.

Generate actionable insights for London and other UK cities by contributing evidence and learnings to a final "learnings toolkit" to support food waste recycling capture and participation. The learnings toolkit will give councils in other densely populated urban areas vital insight into the most effective ways of using campaign-style communications - both city-wide and at a neighbourhood level - to improve food waste-related outcomes.

Evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of running a motivational campaign at a city-wide or hyper-local (in comparison to control areas where no motivational campaign is taking

London-wide evaluation aims:

For the London-wide campaign across all 17 funder boroughs, the evaluation must:

Assess the effectiveness of the campaign in increasing motivation and intent amongst our two key target audience segments to recycle their food waste and to waste less food at home.

Assess the effectiveness of the campaign in changing attitudes and perceptions of food waste as an issue, and improving the perception that it is normal to avoid food waste and recycle unavoidable food waste.

Identify changes in our target audiences' assertion that they use their food waste recycling service (claimed behaviour).

Hyper-local evaluation aims

For the hyper-local campaign in a small number of (estimated at between 4-6) target neighbourhoods, the evaluation should address all of the above, and should in addition:

Assess the effectiveness of the campaign in increasing food waste tonnages on a round-by-round basis (actual behaviour); and participation rates in the service depending on availability and affordability of suitable monitoring methodologies across the target neighbourhoods.

Compare the relative effectiveness of the campaign with residents who have newly established food waste services versus those with more long-established services.

If possible, compare the relative effectiveness of the campaign across the five different additional demographic groupings identified above.

Produce robust, transferable evidence - including the (return on investment) ROI of running motivational campaigns around food waste recycling - to go into the final learnings toolkit which will support future campaigns in other urban areas.