More joint working needed to tackle food waste

Consumer goods giant Unilever and retailer Tesco have called for a more ‘joined-up approach’ across the supply chain in order to tackle food waste in the UK.

Speaking at WRAPs annual conference in London last week (November 7), Amanda Sourry, UK and Ireland chair at Unilever, said that fractured offerings of waste services across the UK and Europe are causing inconsistency in communicating messages for both businesses and households.

She said that both harmonisation of collections across the UK and behavioural change with food in the home were needed to tackle food waste and create a circular economy, adding that this is where we see a chance for more working together.

She said: A truly circular economy will require much more joined up thinking and a systematic approach rather than the piecemeal systems we have at the moment.

She added: Ultimately, it is not going to be very helpful if we are doing different things in different parts of the country.

In January, Unilever one of the worlds largest consumer goods companies achieved zero waste to landfill in the UK and Ireland (see letsrecycle.com story).

And, Ms Sourry highlighted Marmite as an example of a Unilever brand that was originally created from waste products from beer, adding that the Marmite factory now has an anaerobic digestion facility on site. However, pointing to the smaller number of AD facilities in the UK compared to countries such as Germany, Ms Sourry said that more investment was needed in the technology.

She said: To realise the true value of AD we need to invest in the long term and learn from others who have done it already.

Tesco

Tackling food waste in both the supply chain and the household was a major topic at WRAPs conference as the organisation also published a report showing that food waste volumes to the waste management industry fell by 1.1 million tonnes up to 2012 (see letsrecycle.com story).

Also speaking at the conference, Matt Simister, food group commercial director at Tesco, highlighted the supermarkets decision last month to become the first UK retailer to publish its food waste arisings, showing that 28,500 tonnes of food waste was generated at its stores and distribution centres in the first half of 2013 (see letsrecycle.com story).

He also agreed that more joined-up working was needed between businesses, producers and government in order to tackle food waste both in the supply chain and households, adding that Tesco intended to share more of its information in future.

Mr Simister added that sharing more information across the industry and improving communications with farmers and producers would enable better understanding across the supply chain.

He said: We have close auditing systems at Tesco for our operations, but further down the supply chain our forecasting is very poor. The answer is going to be the system bringing the solution and us working together to make change.

BOGOF offers

Elsewhere, Mr Simister addressed the issue of buy-one-get-one-free (BOGOF) offers, arguing that simply removing such promotions altogether in stores would not tackle the full extent of the issues regarding food waste in the home.

Mr Simister said: From our point of view, our customers love our pricing and promotions. They are looking for value in what we provide for them. But what the data is showing us is that in some areas there may be a better way of offering that value to our customers.

He added: The reality is that customers have a choice as to what they can buy. If all we did in our stores was offer multisavers then many of our customers would go elsewhere and shop in Aldi or somewhere.

Believe it or not, nobody intends to sell people more than they need. The reality is most consumers require help with leftovers. I think there are more real issues than the promotional point I am not saying we cannot improve the offers we give to people but it is also about improving help we give to customers.