What are supermarkets in Singapore doing with unsold but perfectly edible food?

SINGAPORE – Shredded cereal boxes, dented tuna cans and torn labels. These are things that you rarely see on the shelves of supermarkets in Singapore, and it is not by chance. Items deemed not good enough to sell are screened by supermarkets during the quality control process.

In the past, most of these items ended up in the trash. But as the issue of waste gains traction among the buying public, things are slowly changing.

Since 2015, the supermarket chain FairPrice has been working with the food charity Food from the Heart (FFTH) to redirect items from its 140 outlets to families and individuals in need.

FFTH CEO Sim Bee Hia told The Sunday Times that each month his members are gifted through this program between $ 18,000 and $ 24,000 worth of food, including staples and canned foods.

Food with damaged packaging isn’t the only thing supermarkets abandon.

Tons of products are thrown away due to poor inventory management, such as over-ordering or cosmetic filtering, where edible products but with imperfections or the wrong size are rejected.

Supermarkets have long been singled out as the top culprits for food waste. In 2016, France made headlines by becoming the first country to ban supermarkets from throwing away unsold food. A law was introduced to force these companies to donate food to charities or food banks.

The Sunday Times understands that in a central warehouse of a supermarket chain here, between 15 and 20 pallets of products are rejected per day. Each pallet can contain between 500 kg and a ton of product. The product can be rejected because it does not meet the standards set by supermarkets. For example, some supermarkets accept bananas from vendors only when they are fully green, without a yellow tinge, so they can ripen on the shelves.

Jonas Kor, FairPrice’s director of corporate communications, said the supermarket chain has been selling slightly defective fruits and vegetables at lower prices since 2015 under its “Great Taste, Less Waste” initiative. Last year, it saved around 778,000 kg of fruits and vegetables under this initiative.

Kor said the chain’s e-commerce platform, FairPrice Online, also sells out-of-season items and expiration items in its clearance section.

“Food waste is a pertinent issue that requires sustained and concerted efforts from industry players, government agencies and the community.”

Last year, FairPrice stores generated 2,940 tons of food waste, compared to 3,170 tons in 2018 and 2,700 tons in 2017.

The other major chains, Sheng Siong and Dairy Farm Group, the latter of which runs Cold Storage and Giant grocery stores, declined to say how much food waste they generate each year.

A spokesman for the National Environment Agency (NEA) said it does not have a breakdown of the amount of food waste generated by supermarket chains here, but estimates that 40 percent of the food waste generated in Singapore comes from commercial and industrial sectors. , which include supermarkets.

The spokesperson added that starting in 2024, the owners and occupants of shopping centers, including supermarkets, that generate large amounts of food waste will have to segregate it for treatment. He said NEA will engage these stakeholders to incorporate workflows that segregate food waste into their business operations and adopt food waste recycling initiatives.

“One of the challenges that supermarkets face is the market demand and the treatment of products that may have some imperfections or that do not look aesthetically pleasing.

“This is where consumers can also contribute to food waste reduction efforts. It starts with the understanding and acceptance that odd-looking or even blemished fruits and vegetables can be trimmed and still edible. “

A spokesperson for Sheng Siong said it sells blemished but still healthy food in reduced-to-light sections.

Food products that can no longer be consumed are separated from their packaging and sent for recycling into useful by-products by Sheng Siong’s waste management partner, he added.

A Dairy Farm spokesperson said the company was “committed to reducing waste in our stores” and has implemented measures such as recycling packaging material whenever possible, tailoring inventory management to each store, as well as purchasing planning. .

RedMart’s head of grocery Richard Ruddy said that because all of his products are in one warehouse, he can see an aggregation of consumer demand and predict orders more accurately.

“With nine years of data on consumer preferences, we can forecast demand down to the number of cartons of milk that will be purchased per day.”

He added that, compared to a conventional market, the online grocery platform does not “need to stock up on fresh produce on the shelves of dozens of stores, not all of which is sold and ultimately wasted.”

RedMart, which is owned by Lazada, said it works with social business UglyFood to resell some of the slightly blemished products at discounted prices. He also works with the local company Crust Brewing to turn expired bread into beer.

Aside from the supermarkets, the bakeries here also throw away dozens of unsold bread at the end of the business day.

FFTH has worked with bakery chains like BreadTalk and Swissbake, as well as smaller neighborhood bakeries and hotel buffet lines, to save this destination’s bread with its 17-year Bread Run program. His group of volunteers tours more than 100 bakeries each night to collect bags of unsold bread and deliver them to welfare homes and transition centers, as well as to community partners to take to families in need.

In this way, about 28,000 kg of bread destined for containers are recovered each month. Last year, the non-profit organization rescued 336,000 kg of bread worth more than $ 3.5 million and fed 21,600 “happy stomachs” in the process, Ms Sim said.

Bread is inexpensive, so most people hardly think about throwing it away. But throwing away large amounts of bread is problematic not only because it adds more garbage to Singapore’s Semakau landfill, but also because the energy and resources invested in producing it are wasted.

Producing a loaf of bread involves a lengthy process of growing and harvesting wheat, transporting the grains to the mill, grinding them into flour, and finally baking and packing them.

However, bread remains one of the most undervalued items in the eyes of the people.

A study by the NEA in 2017 found that each week, an average Singapore household throws away around 2.5kg of food waste. Bread, along with rice and noodles, were the most wasted foods.

While FFTH’s Bread Run program has gone a long way toward preventing waste, a handful of bakeries told the charity that they are reluctant to donate unsold bread due to liability concerns.

“(There is always) the fear that someone will eat the food and become intoxicated,” Ms Sim said.

Mr. Louis Ng, MP for Nee Soon GRC and Chairman of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Sustainability and the Environment, is working to remove this barrier for businesses that want to give away unsold food products. The Good Samaritan Food Donation Act that he plans to introduce would provide legal protection to these companies against such liability.

“Large amounts of food are wasted and then there are people who go hungry.

If Singaporeans see that there is an avenue in which they can donate to the less fortunate, I think that matches the two causes quite well, ”he said.

“That’s why we wanted to do this piece of legislation, to really highlight this issue, food waste, the hungry.”

Around 1.3 billion tons of food is wasted every year around the world, even as 800 million people in the world go to bed hungry every night.

Having good Samaritan laws would ease anxiety for businesses, Ms. Sim said. But the challenge would be to ensure food safety standards for the different types of donated food, he added.

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