Cutting food waste saves money for French supermarkets

PARIS: Cutting food waste is an appealing social goal, but experiments in France found that measures to cut the amount of food being thrown out also saved supermarkets money.

Like a number of other countries, France has recently adopted legislation that forces supermarkets to donate to charities food that is unwanted or past its sell-by date but still edible.

While retail shops and markets account for the smallest percentage of losses in the food chain, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency ADEME nevertheless found that they were responsible for the equivalent of 2.8 billion meals going to waste annually, and that there was much that could be done to reduce spoilage.

It recently teamed up with five supermarket chains – Auchan, Carrefour, E Leclerc, Intermarche and Systeme U - to experiment in 10 stores.

The result: “With often simple actions that cost little it is possible to cut food waste by 22 per cent in three months across the stores,” said ADEME.

If adopted across the country, “the measures would save 300,000 tonnes of food per year and more than 700 million euros ( US$ 745 million) per year”, it said.

In the northwestern town of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Auchan hired two people to sell delicate fruit such as peaches, which often get bruised by being handled too much by customers and staff as well as overstacked on displays.

“Over two months we made 15,000 euros in savings,” said the store manager, Frederic Vaccaro, at a recent news conference presenting the results of the experiments.

By adjusting the grocery selection and selling some products, like pies, by the piece, his store made 220,000 in annual savings.

“The effort is worth the money,” said Vaccaro.

The changes made in the 10 supermarkets resulted in saving the equivalent of 160 tonnes of food per year, or some 320,000 meals.

“For each store, that represented a savings of 70,000 per year on average,” said ADEME, adding that food waste usually costs supermarkets some 400,000 euros per year on average.

ADEME calculated that would boost a supermarket’s grocery sales by an average of 0.9 per cent.

In a business known for razorthin margins, this would “have a considerable impact on the net margin of stores, that is to say their profits”, said the agency.

One of the major problems that ADEME identified was supply management.

In certain supermarkets, it found over- ordering resulted in less than one per cent of products causing 20 per cent of food waste by value.

Another was products were being damaged by being handled too much, and employees weren’t being trained to focus on avoiding waste.

ADEME has put up a list of recommended measures for supermarkets to adopt, like reducing the number of products on shelves and appointing a staff member to be responsible for reducing food waste. — AFP