Expired food shops a hit in Copenhagen

IT MAY be past its sell-by date, but for many Danes it’s a tasty proposition: A supermarket in Copenhagen selling surplus food has proved to be so popular it recently opened a second store.

After launching in the gritty inner city district of Amager earlier this year, the “Wefood” project earlier this month drew a long line as it opened a second branch in Norrebro, a trendy neighbourhood popular with left-leaning academics and immigrants.

Hipsters rubbed shoulders with working-class moms as a cooking school founded by Claus Meyer – a co-founder of Copenhagen’s celebrated Noma restaurant – handed out cauliflower soup and bread made from surplus ingredients.

“It’s awesome that instead of throwing things out they are choosing to sell it for money. You support a good cause,” said Signe Skovgaard Sorensen, a student.

“Isn’t it great?” pensioner Olga Fruerlund said, holding up a jar of sweets that she planned to give to her grandchildren for Christmas.

The sweets “can last for a hundred years because there is sugar in them”, she added.

Selling expired food is legal in Denmark as long as it is clearly advertised and there is no immediate danger to consuming it.

All products are donated by producers, import and export companies and local supermarkets, and are collected by Wefood’s staff, all of whom are volunteers. The store’s profit goes to charity.

Prices are about half of what they would be elsewhere.

The products available depend on what is available from donors, resulting in an eclectic mix that changes from day to day.

Food waste has become an increasingly hot topic in recent years, with initiatives ranging from a French ban last year on destroying unsold food products, to a global network of cafes serving dishes with food destined for the scrap heap.

The Britain-based The Real Junk Food Project opened the country’s first food waste supermarket in a warehouse near Leeds in September. With a greater focus than its Danish peer on feeding the poor, the British project urges customers to simply “pay as they feel”.

A UN panel said earlier this month that supermarkets’ preference for perfect-looking produce and the use of arbitrary “best befo labels caused massive food waste that if reversed could feed the world’s hungry.

Nearly 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted every year, more than enough to sustain the one billion people suffering from hunger globally, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation said.

Denmark has managed to reduce its food waste by 25% over the past five years, partly due to the influential Stop Wasting Food group founded by Russian-born activist Selina Juul in 2008.

Juul grew up in the 1980s Soviet Union and says she was shocked by the amount of food being thrown away in Denmark when she moved there as a 13-year-old in 1993.

“Surplus food has become very popular,” she said of one of the measures advocated by the group: offering heavy discounts on items that are about to expire. — AFP