To help people clear cluttered fridges and reduce food waste, researchers in Tokyo are testing simple organisational techniques – and all you need to get started is some tape and a few stickers.

Have you ever opened your refrigerator and felt a surge of anxiety? Perhaps you struggled to find anything to actually eat amid an excessive jumble of jams, pickles, spreads and half-empty condiments. Or you found yourself befuddled by which of the foil-wrapped remains of bygone meals you should prioritise eating first. Maybe you've even peeked inside a long-forgotten container with contents so foul that you simply threw the entire thing into the garbage.

If any of this sounds familiar, you are not alone. "Quite often, the reason food goes bad and gets wasted is because you forget about it in the fridge and find it rotten later," says Kohei Watanabe, a waste management researcher at Teikyo University in Tokyo.

Household food loss is a global problem of staggering proportions. In the UK, about 60% of all food waste comes from homes, and in the US, 40-50% does. The statistics are similar in Japan. In 2021, around 47% of the country's 5.2 million tonnes of edible food waste originated from private kitchens.

The reasons for all this at-home waste vary, but there are some common culprits across cultures and geographies. These include food getting "lost" inside people's fridges; consumers misinterpreting the meaning of food date labels; impulse buying and poor planning during supermarket visits; and a general lack of awareness about the need to reduce food loss.

Virtually all countries are aware of these problems and many are trying to address them. But Japan faces even greater pressure to find solutions because it imports nearly two-thirds of its food. This amplifies the economic and environmental costs of throwing edible products away. "Japan is a country that is not at all self-sufficient in its food supply," says Tomoko Okayama, a waste management researcher at Taisho University in Tokyo. "It's not a good idea to import more food than we need and then throw a lot of it away."

As two of Japan's leading food waste researchers, Okayama and Watanabe explore the underlying drivers of why edible food winds up in the bin, and then try to use those findings to devise evidence-informed interventions. Their latest project applies fridge-tidying techniques to tackle one of the main sources of loss: the dreaded cluttered fridge. As Okayama says, "If we can help people manage their fridges, we can stop them from forgetting about the existence of the food inside."

In 2018, Okayama conducted a survey of more than 500 Tokyo residents to explore why they discarded food. Predictably, respondents often assumed fresh produce had gone bad, or that processed foods would no longer taste pleasant. Sometimes, it was simply forgotten. However, she also identified an important source of confusion that leads to waste: many people threw out food at the "best-by" date (also known as "best-before").

"Best-by" and "use-by" dates are not the same thing, however – and neither necessarily means that a product is no longer good, especially in the case of fermented foods, Watanabe says. "Foods do go bad eventually and will be unsafe to eat, so we should make sure we consume them before that," he says. "But some items like fermented food taste better with maturity."

In Japan and a number of other countries, "best-by" refers to the........

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