Both Lidl and Waitrose are striving to improve in-store food waste levels by retraining staff and trialling new processes.
Lidl is finalising details before announcing new trials aimed at ensuring ambient surplus is always donated. It is also re-educating staff in all stores on existing process to remind them what should be donated.
Waitrose regional managers are working with stores to reinforce processes as it plans further steps with its compliance and ethics & sustainability teams. The supermarket is looking at actions it can take quickly alongside others that would take longer to implement.
Both retailers are looking anew at store-level food waste after being rocked in recent weeks by a social media exposé of bins filled with in-date food that looked still good to eat, such as tinned beans, cereals, fruit and bakery items.
Kris Gibbon-Walsh, CEO of redistribution charity FareShare and guest editor of The Grocer this week along with The Felix Project CEO Charlotte Hill, said store staff were sometimes unaware of policy.
He said individual staff would often be thinking about “how they take surplus from this or that part of the shop” and “ownership” was needed.
“One item might in isolation seem like it doesn’t matter,” but “the combination of stock is really powerful”, he said. “The bigger the mix the better from a redistribution point of view.
“That’s the big bit around training: have you been able to collect everything in the store, not just the easy bits?”
Hill said: “We would massively welcome the opportunity to do more training with store colleagues around what can and can’t be redistributed.”
Both supermarkets already have policies in place that should ensure edible surplus is donated to charity. Lidl partners with redistribution platform Neighbourly to allow volunteers from local charities to collect edible surplus from stores across the country each day.
Waitrose works nationally with FareShare, which recently merged with The Felix Project. Edible surplus is donated to charities through a FareShare app, and if they are unable to collect then it should be distributed to local communities via the volunteer-based initiative Olio.
Waitrose and Lidl said they were taking new measures in messages to the bin-raiding activist behind the social media account Food_waste_inspector_. The anonymous campaigner said Lidl had asked him to “continue my evidence gathering so they can identify the stores who are failing to donate”, and Waitrose had “kept me updated throughout what’s going on”.
“Lidl have said they are retraining staff and putting things in place so no ambient food is wasted, so it is a case of seeing if this is true,” he said.
Both supermarkets were approached for comment.
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