Social Innovation: UK Supermarket's Food Waste Is Another Man's Banquet

The biggest source of food waste in the UK is in the home and the British government estimates that 8.3 million tonnes is lost this way. Changing attitudes are at the heart of the government's social innovation campaign, "Love Food Hate Waste", which aims to get people making the most of ingredients and using food in imaginative ways rather than just throwing it away. More than 2.2 million children and two million adults are now living in absolute poverty in the UK; the soaring food prices are contributing to a growing national poverty crisis. There are many solutions for keeping food edible that have been around for as long as people have been cooking their food.

This October, Oxfam reported that in the past five years food prices have risen at twice the rate of the minimum wage. Adam Askew from Oxfam says, "In the UK alone, three million tonnes of food are wasted by the food industry. The perverse nature of this is that nearly a billion people globally go to bed hungry every night. We need to tackle food waste here in the UK and rising food prices that are driving people into poverty and hunger across the world". The country's manufacturing food chain needs a massive rethink to its policies, using more social innovation ideas. The government estimates that the UK throws out £17bn of food every year; two-thirds of that is domestic and the rest is from the food industry.

The government wants more social innovation thinking from supermarkets and blames confusing labelling for a huge portion of waste, which baffles customers about when food is and not safe to eat. It wants supermarkets to change misleading sell-by, or display-until dates, which have no bearing on whether food is safe to eat. FareShare, a food charity says that in 2010 it redirected 3,600 tonnes of surplus food to the poor; which is the equivalent of 8.6 million meals. Jim Trower, the organisation's director of operations says, "If manufacturers would state that their food is safe to eat after the best-before or display-until dates, then we could redistribute more pasta, cereal, rice and other food that poses no risk when eaten shortly after the sell-by date." Legally, charities cannot redistribute food that is past its sell-by or best-before date.

However, supermarkets state that sell-by and display-until dates are necessary for stock rotation and waste-reduction processes. The amount of good food thrown out by stores is appalling, yet it's nothing when compared to the waste at manufacturing levels. The government believes that where 362,000 tonnes of food is binned at store level, the figure for the manufacturing stage of the food chain is closer to 2.6 million tonnes. This is the food surplus that FareShare wants to have access to and harness social innovation to feed the starving of Great Britain, a nation in the developed world.

Photo Credit: Nick Saltmarsh