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FOOD WASTE

Food waste or surplus is the excess of food that may end up going to waste. Here are just a few reasons that good food goes to waste:

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  • Cosmetic imperfection: Fruits and vegetables come in all different shapes, sizes and colours. We love them no matter what they look like; after all it’s the inside that counts!

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  • Off-cuts: Nose to tail eating is our philosophy!

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  • Overproduction: In order to meet supermarket demand, farmers overproduce and we collect all this lovely surplus stock.  

 

  • Cancelled or returned orders: It’s often cheaper for home delivery companies to dump food rather than paying staff time to sort it and return it to shelves.

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  • Bespoke orders: Some producers make bespoke products and offer them exclusively for particular partners to sell. There are often leftovers which cannot be sold to their regular clients.

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  • Past best before date: Best before dates are about quality, not safety, and can be extremely over cautious. 

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  • Leftovers at the end of a food market day: Some artisan producers build their reputation on quality promises like, “fresh bread every day”. So despite the fact that their beautiful artisan loaves might be great the next day, they won’t be saved and reused...Until we turn them into lovely sandwiches.  

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  • Damaged packaging or labelling issues: Often it’s cheaper for a food company to throw food away than it is to reprint a label! We don’t mind about spelling mistakes and upside-down labels here!

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A recent study by the UN FAO showed that the carbon footprint of wasted food currently stands at 3.3 gigatonnes. Which means that if food waste was a country, it would be the 3rd highest carbon emitter on the planet after the US and China.

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Around 10% of the UK’s carbon footprint comes from food that is never eaten.

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For every tonne of food that we stop from going to waste we stop 4.2 tonnes of CO2e from being emitted into the atmosphere.

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