Progress on food waste

Posted by Alexandra Bentz on 14 Jul 2020.

May was an exciting month for the Food Matters campaign, with two major campaign wins. First, Morrisons published its food waste figures for the first time – one of the key requests of our campaign. Second, Tesco announced that, in direct response to the WI’s campaigning and research, it will be removing best before dates from 70 lines of packaged fruit and veg. These are two great examples of the power of the WI coming together to make positive long-lasting change.

The Food Matters campaign

The Food Matters campaign was started in 2016 as a result of a resolution at that year’s annual meeting. Over five thousand WI members took part in our food waste research project, telling us about their own food waste habits and visiting supermarkets to investigate practices on the shelves. This led us to publish a report in which we set out a series of recommendations to retailers, which was turned into a manifesto for WIs to hand to into their local supermarkets.

The NFWI has been pushing retailers to change their practices by meeting with key players in the retailers’ food waste teams to outline our recommendations. This combined with WI members speaking up in their local communities, ensures that the WI is a powerful voice for change.

Tesco removing best before dates from packaged fruit and veg

Thanks to the WI’s research and campaigning (or as The Times put it in its article covering the move, our “intense lobbying”) Tesco is now removing best before dates from 70 lines of packaged fruit and vegetables. This is a great step that we feel have a positive effect on lowering food waste levels in the home, as our research showed significant confusion around date labelling. WI members told us that they believe people may be too reliant on best-before labels (which are not linked to food safety) when deciding whether or not food is safe to eat, often throwing perfectly good food out unnecessarily.

We congratulate Tesco for taking this important step and will encourage all other retailers to consider following this step.

Morrisons start the journey towards food waste transparency

We would like to see all of the supermarkets be much more transparent about their food waste statistics, so we were excited to see Morrisons publish its food waste figures for the first time. This provides a baseline from which progress on food waste can be measured. It is important that all other retailers join Morrisons (and for a few years now, Tesco) in publishing their figures on an annual basis. Lynne Stubbings, NFWI Chair, wrote to the editor of The Grocer to welcome this move, and to push Morrisons to go further. She argued that:

“While this initial publication is a good start, Morrisons still have much further to go to increase transparency around food waste in their business. First, it must commit to extending the scope of these figures to their suppliers. Second, it must ensure that they publish these data on their website, in a format easily accessible to the public, not buried in deep in a CSR report. Third, it must move beyond providing merely a single headline figure and outline a breakdown of the figures.”

These are two great successes for the Food Matters campaign, and we will continue to push all supermarkets to follow all of the recommendations in the “Wasted Opportunities” report.