Another day, another supermarket-bashing report – even if this latest one is slightly unexpected. This time it’s aiming at the upright, conscientious, middle-class shoppers’ favourite. But now Waitrose has been criticised by the campaign group, Feedback Global, for being the worst performer out of 10 UK supermarket chains at tackling food waste.
According to Feedback Global’s findings, Waitrose provides no public data on food waste. It redistributes a small quantity of food compared with other retailers, has done limited work with suppliers to reduce food waste, and has no programme to send permissible food surplus to serve as animal feed. This is in striking contrast to Tesco – the supermarket all right-thinking people like me are supposed to hate. Tesco was the first group to produce third-party audited food-waste data, and in 2017, according to the report, increased its food surplus distribution network by 40% on the previous year, donating 7,975 tonnes of food to people in need.
Far from being smug or discerning, many Waitrose shoppers like me will be looking at themselves, thinking of the oft-tweeted Mitchell and Webb sketch, asking: “Are we the baddies?”. The Waitrose PR team may be on high alert, activating damage control procedures, and we need to demand that they do more to tackle food waste. But we should also rethink our own expectations of and demands on supermarkets.
The inhabitants of the Hebridean island of Islay make a mad dash to the island’s Co-op on a Tuesday afternoon, two hours after the fresh food lorry has made its weekly visit to the island, as they know that the fresh produce will sell out that afternoon. Pacts are made between neighbours so those at work or unable to get to the other side of the island can still get their weekly fresh produce that can’t be bought elsewhere on Islay. Most of us who live in urban or suburban areas have come to expect shelves consistently heaving with fresh produce right up until closing time, and woe betide the supermarket that doesn’t meet those expectations.
This need to have anything we want at virtually any time we want has huge consequences for the food supply chain, as well as creating serious issues with food waste. As individuals, we could consider how our own choices are helping cause a surplus of unsold food.
Simply giving away unsold but perfectly good food seems like a very sensible idea, but it is complicated both logistically and politically. Aside from practicalities, are supermarkets still liable for the food they give away? What are the legal and logistical realities of giving away highly perishable goods? And given that the present government, which is still leading in some opinion polls, has actively created a hostile environment for immigrants, the poor and the disabled, the chances of it passing a law akin to the one passed by the French senate in 2016, obliging supermarkets to donate unsold food to charities and food banks, are about as likely as the England team making it to the semifinals of the World Cup.
Indeed, donating the food to breakfast clubs for children in deprived areas, refugee kitchen spaces, or volunteer kitchens that work alongside food banks would be a PR disaster. It would be a matter of weeks, not months, before a newspaper wrote an exclusive exposé on “scroungers” feasting on free food from supermarkets that hard-working families have to pay for. Corporations may not create these environments but they are highly sensitive to them, and the risk of backfire and outrage may simply be too great.
The report also criticised all supermarkets for overzealous best-before dates that lead to millions of pounds’ worth of needless food waste. Are we so distrusting of our own instincts to know when a yoghurt has gone off that we rely on the date on the lid? Just as we need to temper our expectations around fresh produce, we need to better educate ourselves about best-before dates and food waste – or we, the customers, could end up being the baddies.