Food Loss and Waste in Distribution: A Retailer’s Perspective

Food waste is an expected and inevitable byproduct of any supermarket retailer operation. In the US, the supermarket industry is held to high standards and expected to provide high quality fresh products and make them readily available to consumers during the regular shopping hours and at times, around the clock. These expectations, coupled with the ongoing dilemma of the product shelf life as related to “Best used by XXX date”, or “Sell by XXX date”, along with issues related to efficient packaging have added to the complexity of resolving the food waste problem. In addition to the waste generated by the in store food preparation processes, the quality control process of daily culling begs the question of what to do with unsold food and how to divert it from the waste stream. This presentation will address how Ahold USA and its retail divisions operating under the Stop & Shop banner in NE and NY, the Giant Martin’s in PA and VA, and Giant in MD are trying to deal with this issue. The practices currently in place include, marking down unsold product, reducing the waste by re-purposing the product, donations to food banks, composting, animal feed and last but not least planning to converting it to a renewable energy source (anaerobic digester), used to generate electricity