Supermarkets Dig into the Challenge of Food Waste

The average supermarket stocks 28,112 items and much of the fresh produce, packaged meats, cartons of milk and prepared meals lining store shelves ends up in a landfill.

“The waste is really mindboggling,” admits Jennifer Molidor PhD, senior food campaigner for the Center for Biological Diversity.

To complicate matters, most supermarkets don’t track their food waste, which means there’s no clear data on how much edible food ends up in dumpsters instead of shopping carts. ReFED, a national nonprofit working to end food waste, estimated that retailers generated 10.5 million tons of food waste, sending almost one-third of wasted food to the landfill.

Despite concerns about the environmental impacts of wasted food from squandered resources required to grow, process and transport foods to the methane food waste generates in the landfill, Molidor believes waste is built into the supermarket retail strategy.

“Overstocking is business as usual,” she says. “The consumer is much more likely to buy a head of lettuce when it’s one in a pile of 20 heads of lettuce.”

Possible Solutions

Legislation could play a role, and already has, in reducing food waste in supermarkets.

France was a pioneer in excess food laws, enacting legislation in 2016 that banned supermarkets from throwing out edible food. It’s been suggested that the law sparked the development of “a whole ecosystem of businesses that are helping grocery stores better manage their stocks and reduce food waste.”

In the United States, seven states, including California, Connecticut and Massachusetts, have passed bills that restrict food waste from going to the landfill.

New York state assemblyman Tom Abinanti co-sponsored the Excess Food Act. The bill, which goes into effect in June 2021, requires supermarkets with over 10,000 square feet of retail space to donate excess food to food banks, soup kitchens and other relief agencies that request donations.

“Supermarkets don’t want to sell [food] that’s close to the expiration date because customers won’t buy it,” Abinanti says. “The food is still good if it’s approaching — or even if it passes —the ‘sold by’ date [and] it can be distributed; we don’t have to worry about it spoiling.”

New technologies are also helping grocers reduce their food waste. The app Too Good To Go launched in Denmark and has been rolled out across 15 countries in Europe and the United Kingdom to alert customers about excess food, allow in-app purchases, at discounted prices, that are picked up in the stores before food goes to waste. Developers expect to roll out the app in the United States later this year.

Gunders believes these “flash sale” apps have the potential to reduce food waste. Other tools, including enhanced demand planning that use Big Data to help supermarkets predict demand and order the right amount of foods, could also cut down on wasted food.

“Retailers manage huge amounts of food and are so influential in the food system,” Gunders says. “It’s always been important to grocery stores to be good community institutions and they are starting to see [food waste reduction] more as a way to do that [but] there are opportunities for them to do more.”

For food waste reduction efforts to be successful, Molidor notes that supermarkets must first commit to achieving zero waste, set a target date and provide transparent data to consumers about their efforts. With those tools, she believes supermarkets could achieve zero food waste by 2025.

“It’s an ambitious goal,” she admits. “If Walmart, which is a massive company, can do it, other companies can do it, too.”

Top photo by mandritoiu/Adobe Stock.