Food fills tummies, not landfills
FoodStuffs’ New World and Pak ‘n Save supermarkets are adopting a new waste minimisation programme, which half the stores nationwide are now using.
Though the dumpsters behind supermarkets are a lot larger than the household rubbish bin, supermarket dumpsters are far less filled with food waste.
Foodstuffs sustainability manager Mike Sammons said stores under the programme should have no food waste going to landfill.
Already this year 22,400 tonnes of food waste has been diverted from landfill and redistributed as donation to food banks, stock feed and composting.
He said less than 1 per cent of the total products in a supermarket ended up in the dumpsters behind stores, and 19 per cent of total waste ended up in landfills.
‘‘Stores yet to go on the programme still make every possible effort to minimise their waste as clearly there is a cost to dispose of that waste,’’ said Sammons.
To get a better handle on how much food waste was coming from households, WasteMINZ ran a three-year campaign auditing household rubbish.
The campaign called Love Food Hate Waste found the average household sent around 79 kilograms of edible food to landfills a year, and on average households threw out $563 of food a year.
This amounted to 122,547 tonnes of food.
Countdown general manager James Walker said the supermarket chain donated more than $3.5 million of surplus food to food charities annually, and another $1.2m to local farmers as food scraps for their animals.
Walker said the most efficient way to stop food waste from supermarkets was to accurately predict the volumes of food needed.
Whenever Countdown over estimates these figures, charities and farmers benefit.
Wellington-based Kaibosh is one organisation redistributing surplus supermarket food.
Kaibosh is New Zealand’s oldest food rescue organisation, founded in 2008. The group has received surplus food from supermarkets since 2012.
Kaibosh spokeswoman Anoushka Isaac said: ‘‘When we started sourcing from supermarkets, we noticed a huge increase in the amount of food we receive and the quality of food that we’re receiving - lots of fresh produce, which is what we really try and focus on.’’
Issac said last year, 85 per cent of the food collected went to community groups.
The other 15 per cent was either donated to Black Sheep Animal Sanctuary as animal feed, or composted.
WasteMINZ’s Jenny Marshall said there was not much information on how much produce fell by the wayside between the farm and supermarket.
The largest global study on where in the food chain waste occurs was done by FAO in 2011, which lumped Oceania and North America into one category.
The study found North American and Oceania consumers were responsible for a higher proportion of total food waste than any other group surveyed, contributing 61 per cent of total waste.
Marshall said in reality this figure might even be higher in New Zealand, because New Zealand farmers probably generate less waste than American farmers, who receive government subsidies.
‘‘I would suspect that people who are getting subsidised for how much they produce, regardless of whether it makes it off the farm or not, may be more wasteful than in a New Zealand environment where if you can’t sell it no one’s going to give you a helping hand,’’ said Marshall.