Tesco has pledged to halve food waste in its own operations by 2025, five years ahead of its original target based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (by 2030).
The retailer highlighted that it had already achieved a 45% reduction in food waste across its operations against a 2016/17 baseline. However, to meet its accelerated target, Tesco will be ramping up existing programmes and developing new measures.
This includes further investment in its existing food surplus redistribution programmes, such as FareShare and OLIO. Tesco plans to expand its supplier partnership programme to further help companies to reduce food waste in a variety of ways, including stocking ‘wonky’ fruit and veg, working with suppliers to manage bumper crops; and helping suppliers distribute surplus food to local communities.
The retailer is also working on new solutions, such as testing how food waste can be fed to Black Soldier Flies to create protein that can be used as an alternative to soy animal feed.
Meanwhile, Tesco will also be aligning pay performance targets of its executive to key sustainability measures, including reducing food waste – a first amongst UK food retailers. This means that 25% of the Performance Share Plan awards Executive Directors receive will depend on Tesco’s progress on key sustainability measures, including gender and ethnicity representation, carbon reduction and food waste reduction in its own operations.
“While I’m proud of our progress in making sure good food doesn’t go to waste, we know there’s still more work to do,” said Ken Murphy, Tesco Group CEO.
“By accelerating our target to halve food waste in our operations by 2025 and aligning executive pay performance targets to this goal, we hope to drive further transformative change.”
Murphy also reiterated calls for the government to introduce mandatory food waste reporting to help measure and judge if real progress is happening. “Action must be taken across the whole industry,” he said.
