At Asda, we’re passionate about reducing food waste as a business, it’s something that our customers and colleagues really care about and its important not just to us, but to our environment.
We know the importance of the role we have to play in tackling the problem of waste as a major retailer and we’ve been working hard as a business, alongside our suppliers, to come up with some solutions.
As a member of WRAP, the not-for-profit food waste charity, we play an active part in reducing food waste and we’ve made the commitment to as signatures of the Courtauld Commitment 2025 to reduce our food waste by 20% by 2025 and, and as signatures on the UK food waste reduction roadmap, we’ve committed to halving food waste by 50% by 2030. We’re constantly looking for ways to meet these targets through innovation across the whole of the supply chain – from field to fork.
We know we can’t tackle the problem alone, its something we need to work collaboratively on, which is why we are passionate about working in partnership with our suppliers on this. We’ve collected data for over 7 years from our suppliers, which tells us that food waste has reduced significantly, so we know this collaborative approach really works.
Recently, we hosted Asda’s sustainability conference where over 900 candidates from suppliers across the globe came together with our colleagues to help change the face of surplus food. We provided tools, tips and live case studies to help suppliers understand the actions they can take to redistribute surplus food.
I’m really pleased to say we’re also making great progress in our stores too, by enabling millions of meals to be redistributed through our partnership with FareShare Go. At the end of each day, our colleagues help thousands of charities and community groups across the country to access fresh, quality surplus food which otherwise might have gone to waste. Through this partnership, not only are we helping tackle the problem of surplus food, but we’re also making sure we help those in need in our local communities.
We’re also helping our customers to fight against food waste too. Our Asda magazine regularly featured recipes and tips for our customers to help them ‘love’ their leftovers or re-use food which might otherwise have gone to waste.
Although we know there is more to be done and that can be done to tackle this problem, it’s easy to forget that we are on a journey and we’ve already come a long way. We know that if we keep working with our colleagues and suppliers, together we will hit our target to half our food waste by 2030.
