Using the World Cup and Large-Scale Events to Raise Awareness

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Using the World Cup and Large-Scale Events to Raise Awareness About the Importance of Reducing Food Waste

Status: Active
Operational Plan: 2025
Project Duration: 24 months
Start date: April 2025

Large public events (such as sports games, music concerts, and cultural celebrations that may take place at stadiums or other public gathering spaces) offer a unique opportunity for both promoting awareness of wasted food and engaging and activating a diverse crowd that might not have felt compelled to act on the issue before. Furthermore, large-scale public events require coordination and execution of massive food operations, and cities organizing such events face associated challenges with waste and materials management.

The World Cup is one of the world’s largest and most-watched sporting event and as such, attracts viewers and attendees of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and nationalities and therefore provides a unique opportunity to develop and pilot the use of public-facing assets and deployment guide that will be prepared under this project. This material will feed in other tools providing guidance and messaging for partners to capitalize on the setting and local surroundings of a wide range of other large public events to launch effective sustainability campaigns, thereby producing both highly visible and evergreen assets through this project.

To find out more about this project, here is the complete project description.

Issues

Food loss and waste remain a societal problem in North America.
The scale and continent-spanning setting of the 2026 World Cup presents a unique opportunity to highlight the issue of wasted food and opportunities for fans and local residents to take action in their own lives to reduce wasted food.
Scaling this up would offer new opportunities to expand the efforts to prevent and reduce food loss and waste by using the findings from this pilot to enable subsequent tool refinement for use in other types of future large-scale public events in North America.

Aim

This project also aims to develop generic materials that municipal and local governments, as well as event managers and organizers, sports venues, and other organizations can use for many types of large-scale public events, taking into account learnings from the World Cup.

Deliverables

A World Cup 2026 Food Waste Reduction Awareness-Raising Campaign Development and Deployment.
A social marketing toolkit and customizable assets to support Planning and Delivery of Food Waste Reduction Awareness-Raising Campaigns at a wide range of public large-scale events.
Continued outreach, promotion, and awareness-raising of CEC products related to food loss and waste prevention and reduction.