Buy-one, get-one-free offers could be banished from supermarket shelves under a government plan to reduce Britain’s food waste mountain.

Supermarket chiefs will be told instead to offer half-price deals and package food in a greater range of sizes to suit the single person’s fridge as well as the family’s.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is demanding that stores agree to a tough target on reducing food waste or face legislation that forces them to make savings.

Buy-one, get-one-free deals, known as “bogofs”, are one of the main reasons why a third of all food is wasted, a report on food security and sustainability found.

Households throw away 4.1 million tonnes of food each year that could have been eaten if it had been managed better, according to Wrap, the Government’s waste watchdog. Food waste costs the average household £420 a year and the average person throws away more than their own weight in food annually. Single-person households, now almost a third of all homes, waste the most, partly because bogofs encourage them to buy quantities they cannot eat by the use-by date.

The report said that the new industry target on food waste, which would be set next year and cover the period to 2015, would have to save households at least £370 million a year.

Supermarkets will be encouraged to phase out bogofs on perishable food. In the interim, they will be required to give shoppers advice on how to reduce wastage, for example with labels on whether items can be frozen and recipes for overripe fruit and vegetables.

Defra and the Food Standards Agency are also preparing new guidance to reduce confusion about date labels on food. Wrap research found that millions of people did not know the difference between “sell-by” and “use-by” dates and also failed to realise that they could eat food after the “best-before” date.

A new label, the Healthier Food Mark, will be launched this year for food that meets minimum standards for nutrition and sustainability. Hospitals and prisons will buy food with the mark and it will be rolled out nationwide from 2012.

Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, is also seeking to relax restrictions on GM food, by permitting more trials of GM crops in Britain and allowing more imports of GM grains for feeding livestock.

The British Retail Consortium said it would resist attempts to restrict bogofs. “Retailers know their customers better and should be allowed to decide what’s the best policy,” a spokesman said. People who took home more than they could eat should give it to family and friends, he added.

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