Tesco is to begin a trial giving expiring food to customers for free at the end of the day as it tries to cut food waste.
The supermarket will give away some already discounted “yellow sticker” items after 21:30 in some of its smaller Express stores in coming months.
Tesco already donates expiring food to charities and foodbanks. It says it is taking this step to try to meet its goal to halve food waste.
The company said the expiring food would be offered to charities and shop workers first, before customers could take it.
A spokesman said the trial would begin in a small number of its Express stores in the UK. The locations have not been specified, nor the starting date.
“This trial will allow customers to take any remaining yellow-stickered items for free at the end of the day, after they have first been offered to charities and colleagues,” they added.
Tesco is Britain’s largest supermarket chain, with a 27.8% market share. It has 3,700 UK stores and about 750 more abroad.
Are you British? Generally supermarkets in the UK are usually quite community oriented. They often have collection boxes where you can buy an extra item of something you were going to get anyway and they give it to charity, and host other local charity initiatives sometimes. They even have a signboard in my supermarket with local community news and stuff. I believe most food stores give away surplus expiring food to homeless shelters (it says Tesco already does in the article). Giving it away in store is new and welcome but not without precedent. Some stores have a free fruit section for kids already for example.
Ahhh, that’s refreshing :)
We don’t get as much community orientation here in the states from chain businesses. Local business, yes. The one, last, owner operated grocery in my area is amazing about supporting the community.
We had a nasty storm last year, and they kept some of the families that were without power going with free groceries. Yeah, it was the same kind of deal where it was stuff that would have to be disposed of the next day, but that’s still huge when people can’t keep fresh food fresh because there’s no fridge working.
Hell, back when I first became disabled, they heard about it and when my dad would go shopping, they’d have bags full of stuff for him since he always shopped at a regular time and day.
For real, the idea of a grocery chain doing that is amazing. I’m smiling while I type this because it’s the way we should all be able to think about a business. I’m glad y’all have that kind of thing over there :)