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.