Carnival Corporation Celebrates World Food Day With a Year of Less Left Over Progress
To mark World Food Day, communities around the globe came together under the theme ‘Innovate today. Nourish tomorrow.’ At Carnival Corporation, that spirit of innovation has fueled a big year for the company’s award-winning Less Left Over food waste reduction strategy. Spanning dozens of programs, practices and technologies across the company’s world-class cruise lines, Less Left Over has already helped cut food waste by more than 47% compared with 2019 levels, putting Carnival Corporation within reach of its 50% goal for 2030.
Key highlights from this past year include:
- Earning global recognition: In January, Less Left Over was shortlisted for Water, Waste and Resource Efficiency Project of the Year at the edie Awards 2026, the UK’s longest-running corporate sustainability awards scheme. Less Left Over went on to earn top honors throughout the year, including the NAMEPA Marine Environment Protection Award in the Sustainability Category and the Community Contribution Leader Award at the ESG Shipping Awards.
- Sharing the playbook at Seatrade: In April, representatives from Costa Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, food bank partner Fondazione Banco Alimentare and the mayor of Roatan, Honduras took the stage at Seatrade Cruise Global to share how strong partnerships with local governments and nonprofits can turn surplus food into vital support for those in need.
- Bringing surplus meals to The Bahamas: In July, the company celebrated Celebration Key’s first anniversary by launching its meal donation program in The Bahamas. Carnival Freedom and Carnival Conquest delivered the first donation, sending more than 300 pounds of meals to the Grand Bahama Children’s Home and the Urban Renewal Authority. With recent launches in Mexico and the Dominican Republic, in addition to The Bahamas, the donation program now reaches 20 ports worldwide and has provided more than 320,000 meal portions since 2017.
- Feeding local farms: From the Dominican Republic to Alaska, leftover food is finding a second life on neighboring farms. In Alaska, Copper River Princess Wilderness Lodge sent more than 6,600 pounds of food scraps to local farmers and composters this summer, one bucket at a time. Last year, at Amber Cove, a partnership with a farmer in nearby Las Avispas, Maimón turned about 24 metric tons of leftovers into livestock feed.
These milestones rest on a foundation that’s built every day on board. To serve delicious meals for more than 13.5 million guests annually, teams continue to optimize every step in the food lifecycle. The company uses cutting-edge, data-driven systems and technologies to fine-tune purchasing and meal preparation, maximize every ingredient, revise recipes to eliminate waste and monitor dining trends and meal service flows to serve “just right” portions. When scraps remain, more than 640 onboard biodigesters and more than 90 dehydrators across the fleet help break down organic waste and shrink its volume, so that what’s left is handled as responsibly as possible.
This continuous progress reflects the exact kind of shared effort World Food Day was created to inspire. Led annually by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, the observance calls for collective action to help ensure that everyone has access to sufficient, diverse, safe and nutritious food. Carnival Corporation is proud to answer that call through innovation and stewardship from ship to shore.
To learn more about how Carnival Corporation uses innovation to reduce food waste, visit www.carnivalcorp.com/impact/.
