SAINSBURY’S HAS launched a £10m project to tackle household food waste. The “waste less, save more” initiative will start with a £1m trial to test a number of approaches across a single UK town.
The supermarket wants to look at everything from smart fridges and talking bins to new packaging and reward programmes. The test-bed will be a town with a population of 15,000 to 300,000 and have a Sainsbury’s store within a five-mile radius.
Supermarkets are responsible for a small fraction of overall food waste – 0.25m tonnes, or 1%. Sainsbury’s said the project will provide a blueprint for reducing the 7m tonnes of food wasted by households every year.
In recent years, Tesco has been at the forefront of efforts to tackle food waste, publishing a warts and all audit of its supply chain in 2013 as it made reducing food waste one of its three big ambitions. The topic seems to have dropped off its radar this year.
Others are now taking up the challenge. In addition to Sainsbury’s new five-year plan, Asda recently published the results of research involving 20,000 of its customers, which will now be used to figure out the best way to help cut household food waste.
Supermarkets have come under pressure recently to redistribute more of the edible food waste at store level.
