Tesco ties bosses’ bonuses to slashing food waste

TESCO is speeding up its promise to cut food waste in half – bringing its target forward by five years to 2025.

And in a first for a big retailer, store bosses must meet targets to cut food waste or miss out on performance-related bonuses.

For top executives, hitting these targets is worth tens of thousands of pounds or more in Tesco shares. The move by the UK’s biggest supermarket is a boost for The Mail on Sunday’s War On Food Waste campaign and will also put pressure on rivals to follow suit.

Binned food costs families and firms vast sums and leads to additional harmful greenhouse gases.

Tesco agreed in 2016 to cut its food waste in half by 2030. It has trimmed it by 45 per cent, so just 0.35 per cent of the food that it handles goes into the bin.

Boss Ken Murphy said he decided to bring forward the target after seeing the role wasted food plays in worsening droughts, and urged other retailers to follow Tesco’s lead. In an article for today’s Mail+, Mr Murphy says: ‘More than 2.5billion tons of food are thrown away globally each year. Every piece of food has its own water footprint and research shows the amount of water wasted from uneaten food is three times the volume of Lake Geneva.

‘Food waste is not only an environmental crisis in the making – accounting for 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions – it’s also an urgent humanitarian concern.’