Sainsbury’s has used its website to pledge its support an ambitious new Food Waste Reduction Roadmap developed by IGD and Wrap. They made the pledge on their website and it is repeated below:
Tackling food waste has been a key area of focus for Sainsbury’s for a number of years and as a business we are taking innovative steps across our entire value chain. By working closely with our farmers and growers, we are able to ensure what they grow matches the quantities our customers will buy. Crucially, we also source more directly from farmers, meaning we can get products into stores quicker, giving them a longer shelf life as a result.
Elsewhere, we have been looking into new ways of measurement and tracking and have now developed our technology systems to manage stock levels, enabling us to review data for unsold items in real time. By having this in depth insight into where food waste occurs it enables us to identify specific areas that we can address and improve quickly. As a result of this, in 2017/18 our food not consumed waste was 38,304 tonnes, a reduction of eight per cent year-on-year.
While great progress is being made, we recognise that as an industry we can work together and combine our efforts towards a global fight against food waste. We have already signed up to the Cortauld 2025, a voluntary agreement to make food and drink production and consumption more sustainable. By signing up to this new Food Waste Reduction roadmap, alongside fellow UK retailers, food producers, manufacturers, hospitality and food service companies, we can align with businesses across the UK to commit to ambitious targets and continue to cut food waste in our own operations as well as working with our suppliers and customers to enable them to reduce their own levels of food waste.
Judith Batchelar, Director of Sainsbury’s Brand, has been leading the charge on Sainsbury’s commitment to cut food waste, commenting: “We have been working hard to tackle food waste and continue to take significant steps forward in keeping it to an absolute minimum across our entire value chain. This Roadmap is an important implementation to ensure businesses across the UK act consistently, while continuing to make progress towards the global UN SDG Target 12.3. There are some ambitious milestones in here and we’re fully committed to working together with our suppliers and customers to continue to drive progress and ensure we hit our targets.”
