Tesco Misses Food Waste Elimination Target, But There’s an Upshot

(Photo Credit: Tesco)

Tesco, the biggest retailer in the United Kingdom, reports missing its two-year goal of eliminating all food waste from its operation in the country by 2018. A KPMG analysis published in the retailer’s latest annual report showed that Tesco reached 64% of its target and saw food waste increase by more than 6,400 metric tons.

In 2016, Tesco made the commitment that no food safe for human consumption would go to waste from their UK retail operations by the end of 2017/18. The retailer also became the first in the UK to publish food waste data.

The annual report published this week showed that as the company grew its business in 2017/18 and total food sales increased, the level of waste as a percentage of sales remained broadly flat at 0.5%. In 2016/17, total food waste in the UK for Tesco was 46,684 metric tons. However, in 2017/18, that figure rose to 53,126 metric tons — an increase of 6,442 metric tons.

Tesco reported that the 10 million metric tons of food sold in its UK retail operations in 2017/18 generated 73,340 metric tons of surplus; 53,126 metric tons of that ended up as waste that the company sent for energy recovery. Just 0.2% of the surplus was safe for human consumption.

“While we may be one of the most efficient retailers, we’re not happy and we want to do more,” Tesco’s site says. “We want to help reduce food waste, not just at Tesco, but also on farms, in factories, and at home.”

The company’s strategies for tackling food waste include:

• Minimizing surplus in stores and distribution centers by reducing-to-clear food close to its expiry date
• Offering food that cannot be sold to charities and community groups
• Converting chicken fat and used cooking oils to biodiesel
• Recovering energy from food waste through anaerobic digestion or incineration as a last resort
• Working with farmers, growers, and suppliers through partnership agreements, bumper crop management, broadening specifications, and improving food processing to provide stable demand for “imperfect” produce
• Investing in advanced forecasting and ordering systems to manage waste effectively
• Setting up agricultural hubs staffed by trained agronomists to provide insight on the levels and causes of farm waste
• Publishing food waste data that has been independently analyzed by KPMG using the assurance standard ISAE 3000

The Grocer quoted Carina Millstone, executive director of the London-based nonprofit organization Feedback expressing disappointment in Tesco’s numbers. The company’s failure to eliminate food waste completely in its own operations suggests that supermarkets’ business models and ownership structure make them inherently wasteful, she said. “We look forward to Tesco proving us wrong.”

For its part, The Grocer has been urging supermarkets and their suppliers to move toward greater transparency in reporting waste through the Waste Not Want Not Campaign that launched in 2016.

“Transparency and measurement is essential for identifying hotspots, and in tackling the causes of food waste,” Tesco’s UK food waste data site says. “It helps everyone understand how much, where, and why food is being wasted.”

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