At Asda we hate waste of any kind, so reducing food waste is one of our strategic priorities. We focus on three areas: reduction, redistribution and repurpose.
We have a target to reduce food waste by 25% by 2025 and 50% by 2030.
Wasting perfectly good food doesn’t just hurt our pockets, it’s also a major cause of climate change. In the UK alone, food waste is responsible for an estimated 36 million tonnes of GHG emissions every year¹.
In 2022, we removed best before dates on almost 250 fresh fruit and vegetable products to help customers reduce food waste in the home and save money. We continue to look at where we can help reduce customer waste and in early 2023, we went further by changing the use by dates on over half of our own brand yoghurts to a best before date, aiming to reduce the 54,000 tonnes of edible yoghurt thrown away each year (by all retailers).
Operational Food Waste
Balancing product availability with minimising waste is a constant challenge, especially in light of the supply chain disruption seen in 2022, extreme weather and changing customer demands in a cost-of living crisis. We increased the number of charities we work with redistributing surplus food from our distribution sites, these charities are also approved to receive own brand surplus from our suppliers. We are proud that in 2022 through our charity partnerships, our stores, depots and home offices donated 2,173 tonnes of food, the equivalent of more than 5.1 million meals.
Supply Chain Food Waste
In any food supply chain, waste will occur through the production, processing, distribution and presentation of the food at the shelf edge. In 2022 we listened to our suppliers who asked for more options for redistributing surplus own label products and increased redistribution of surplus food by partnering with more charities across the UK.
We Continue to work with…
And introduced the following to our portfolio of approved charities:
The bread and butter thing, a mobile food club which gives access to nutritious and affordable food taken into the heart of communities.
The Felix Project which collects fresh, nutritious food that cannot be sold and delivers it to charities and schools so they can provide healthy meals and help the most vulnerable in our society.
City Harvest, a London food rescue charity addressing food waste and food poverty.
Since 2013, Asda has been working with FareShare to donate surplus food caused by over-supply, damages or short-date codes directly from our chilled depots. Since then we have expanded our charity donation programme to include our home offices, ambient depots and since 2020 all stores have been able to donate surplus through FareShare Go.
From 2013 to 2021, we have donated enough surplus food for over 27.3 million meals.
These donations can include:-
extra food that is delivered in to our depots by suppliers
non-technical quality rejections (e.g a cream cake with a bit of cream on the box)
lines we no longer sell
food with packaging printing errors
food from our stores no longer saleable but still edible
Repurpose
When we have bread that is too stale to be donated to charity we send it to be used for animal feed.
In 2021, 1071 tonnes of bread was sent for animal feed, +39% vs 2020
Split multipacks are sent for resale
Inedible food is sent for anaerobic digestion – this create energy and the by-product, called digestate is used as a fertiliser for farms.
