Much less food wasted by Tesco stores

In just one year Tesco Hungary cut the volume of food waste produced by stores by 35 percent. The retail chain donated more than 7,000 tons of food to people in need. Tesco is convinced that what is measurable is manageable too, so one of their objectives with the annual food waste report is to know precisely how much food ends up in the bin, in order to be able to use the surplus food even more efficiently.

Zsolt Pártos
operations director
Tesco Magyarország

In the 2017-2018 fiscal year Tesco Hungary sold nearly 914,000 tons of groceries, from which 17,436 tons ended up as waste. 10,536 tons were still edible and from this 6,948 tons were given to charity, while 351 tons were used as animal feed. This means that 66 percent of the food surplus was utilised. The quantity of food that ended up as waste reduced from 14,991 tons to 9,764 tons. Zsolt Pártos, operations director of Tesco Hungary told: not a single bite of food that is still edible must be wasted, so they will keep working hard for decreasing food waste even further.

Last year Tesco introduced more efficient sales forecasting and ordering procedures, and thanks to these less food with a short expiry date made it to store shelves, and more food went to food banks and charity organisations. Tesco also has its own food saving programme: more than 600 Tesco stores in Central Europe give leftover groceries to charity organisations and food banks, which use them to help those in need. For instance more than 140 Hungarian stores cooperate with the Hungarian Food Bank Association. In addition to this, in 2017 Tesco launched the Perfectly Imperfect range – fruits and vegetables, which don’t look perfect but are very tasty. (x)