I don’t have a lot of affection for your typical supermarket chain, and Tesco is no exception. However, I feel credit is due to Tesco (the UK’s largest grocer, with 30% of the food market and various offshoots such as a bank, mobile network, music and film streaming service… Even a secondhand car shop). The supermarket has braved inevitable bad headlines to reveal inefficiencies in how it and its customers distribute and eat food.
An extensive study by Tesco has found that 70% of salad on its shelves is thrown away. A good deal of this disposed of by the supermarket when it fails to sell enough bags of the stuff to dieters, annoying middle class foodies and parents. (Nothing wrong with salad by the way, but I find making one from scratch to be a better bet). However, as anybody who has attempted to buy pre-prepared salad on a regular basis knows, a lot of it is thrown away after a couple of days in the fridge, when it has invariably turned into a nasty, watery mush.
Then there’s bread. Half of the fresh bead in Tesco’s in-store bakeries is never eaten: the bulk of this loss is down to the fact that so much of the bread is never sold. I could go on, but I think I’m losing your interest.
What is Tesco doing about it? They’re going to end 3 for 2 and BOGOF (Buy One Get One Free) deals on fresh foods, doing away with a ridiculous policy that encourages overconsumption. I think that ditching multibuy discounts on food altogether is a good idea. But what that won’t do is reduce supermarket-level waste, which Tesco hopes to do by rolling out a more sophisticated stock rotation system over the next few months.
I’d like to know what rival supermarkets in the UK and the US- or any others in the world, for that matter- are doing to play their part on ‘ the War on Waste’.
Nevertheless, there’s a particular anglo-american attitude to food waste that is scandalous whilst hundreds of millions of people, even in our home countries, go hungry. The best example of this is where supermarkets throw away food that has reached its Best Before or Sell By date, so it cannot be sold despite often being perfectly edible. Some supermarkets have good arrangements with hostels or even foodbanks, but in most cases they end up in those huge bins (or ‘dumpsters’ as my American readers would know them) at the back of the supermarkets.
Ah, but there’s a problem for these supermarkets. Freegans and homeless people are likely to open these bins and make use of some of this food. This doesn’t affect the supermarkets: these people would’ve never paid for the food anyway, the supermarket isn’t liable if a novice freegan gets food poisoning; and the bins are tucked out of view of the customers, so there’s not even the risk that a passing customer could even see any scavenging.
That was not good enough for the supermarkets. Now, most bins are in fortified enclosures, as if the supermarkets are determined that the food in them rots on some landfill site rather than giving a hard-up person some much needed sustinence. It’s an utterly ridiculous situation.
So please, let’s think twice before rewarding such places with our custom. As Tesco has shown, just a little customer pressure can yield fantastic results.