Spain's food waste law in hospitality

What it is and who it affects

It is Law 1/2025 of 1 April, on preventing food loss and waste, published in the official gazette on 2 April 2025. It covers the whole food chain, and that includes anyone serving food: bars, restaurants, cafes, takeaways, hotels with catering, event caterers and canteens.

Where it does distinguish by size is in the paperwork. The floor obligations — letting customers take food home, the container, advertising it — are the same for a counter bar as for a chain. The written prevention plan, on the other hand, has a floor-area exemption that takes out almost the entire trade, and we get to it below.

The obligation you notice most on the floor: customers take home what they did not eat

Article 8 requires hospitality businesses to make it possible for the consumer to take home the food they have not eaten. And it says so with two literal conditions worth reading slowly: at no additional cost, and in containers that are food-safe, reusable or easily recyclable.

So: you cannot charge for the container. Not as packaging, not as a service, not by rounding the bill. And it has to be reusable or easily recyclable, which means the usual single-use plastic stops doing the job.

There is one carve-out, and it is inside the same sentence: "at no additional cost other than, where applicable, the one mentioned in the following paragraph". That paragraph points to Title V of Law 7/2022, which requires you to charge for single-use plastic containers. So the correct container is not charged for, and the one the law pushes you away from must be. The practical reading does not change — use reusable or easily recyclable containers and charge nothing — but it is worth knowing where the exception comes from before somebody shows it to you.

• It applies to food served that the customer has not eaten.
• The proper container is not charged for. Single-use plastic is different: Law 7/2022 requires charging for it separately.
• The container must be food-safe and reusable or easily recyclable.
• Buffets and unlimited-service formats are the exception.

The prevention plan: who it really binds

Article 6.4.a) requires you to hold an implementation plan for preventing food loss and waste, and it has been reported as though it reached every bar. It does not, and the exception is in the same article, three lines further down.

Article 6.4.c) exempts from that whole paragraph four the activities of hospitality or restaurants carried out in premises of 1,300 m2 or less. Thirteen hundred metres of floor area is an enormous venue: in practice the vast majority of bars and restaurants in Spain do not need a plan under this law.

Two caveats before relaxing. The first closes the door on splitting the business: regardless of floor area, premises operating under the same tax ID and exceeding 1,300 m2 between them are covered. The second works in your favour: article 6.6 also excludes micro-enterprises — fewer than ten people and up to two million in turnover — from the whole of article 6.

And a warning that is not minor: this is the national law. Several regions have their own rules with different tests, and Law 1/2025 acknowledges it when it speaks of regions with specific regulation requiring a plan. In Catalonia, for one, the test is not floor area but headcount.

• Up to 1,300 m2 of premises: the national law requires no plan from you.
• Several venues under the same tax ID: floor areas add up.
• Micro-enterprise — under 10 people and up to €2M — excluded from all of article 6.
• Check whether your region has its own rule: it may bind you anyway.
• What does not depend on size is article 8, the floor one.

PREVENT     How you match purchasing to expected covers
            How you track use-by dates and stock rotation
            What you do with portions left unsold

DONATE      Who you give fit surplus to
            Under what agreement, even an informal one

REUSE       What goes to animal feed where applicable
            What goes to composting or a waste contractor

MEASURE     How you record what gets thrown and how often you review it

The hierarchy: you cannot just bin it

Article 5 sets an order of priorities to be respected. First prevention, through rational purchasing and production. Then donation for human consumption. Then animal feed. Then other industrial uses as a by-product. And only at the end recycling, composting or energy recovery.

What matters for a restaurant is that skipping the top rungs is not an option: if the surplus is fit for human consumption, the law expects you to try to donate it before it ends up in the bin.

Where to start tomorrow

Three things cover most of it, and none costs money.

• Swap your takeaway containers for reusable or easily recyclable ones, and take them off the bill if you were charging.
• Check whether you need a plan. If you exceed 1,300 m2, counting venues under the same tax ID, or your region requires one, write it: two pages with the four sections above beat nothing.
• Talk to a food bank or a local social organisation and put the arrangement in writing, even if it is an email.
• Start noting what you throw away and how much: it is what will tell you where you are losing money, as well as complying.

What also saves money

Worth saying because it gets lost in the paperwork: the waste the law requires you to prevent is raw material you have already paid for. A venue throwing away ten per cent of what it buys is giving away ten per cent of its food cost.

Which is why a prevention plan pays off more when it rests on real data about what sells and what is left, rather than on a memory-based estimate.

Frequently asked questions