Category Archives: Supermarket

Sainsbury’s Savvy Moves

Sainsbury’s keeps upping the stakes on how a supermarket can do the right thing regarding food waste. The British retailer commissioned research on how purchased food isn’t eaten and found that the average household tosses 10% of what they buy. And that comes at a cost–of about £50 per month. Sainsbury’s also worked w/ quasi-governmental […]

November 9, 2011 | Also posted in International | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

California, not content with having achieved the goal set in 1989 of recycling 50 percent of its waste stream, just passed a bill requiring the state to keep 75 percent of its trash out of the landfill. Way to set the bar high, Cali! — — The Occupy Wall Street gang gets plenty of donated […]

October 14, 2011 | Also posted in Friday Buffet, Household, International, Waste Stream | Comments closed

Beautiful Waste?

Photographer Christopher Breimhurst worked in the food industry for 10 years, including some time at supermarkets. In his current work, Edibles, he finds the beauty in “unmarketable produce.” Instead of throwing these fruits and veggies out, Breimhurst photographed them to illustrate their remaining usefulness. As he puts it: The rejected food is typically destined for […]

October 5, 2011 | Posted in Supermarket | Comments closed

Date Labels Dissected in the UK

Late last week, the UK Government scrapped “sell-by” dates. Food items will no longer be allowed to carry that date label that’s aimed at retailers but confusing for consumers. At the same time, the Government, in the guise of the Dept. of Food, Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), offered authoritative guidance to distinguish between “use-by” and “best-before” labels. In […]

September 19, 2011 | Also posted in Household, International | Comments closed

Friday Buffet

Hot off the press: New data on retail and home produce waste from our friends at the USDA’s Economic Research Service. I’ll break this down further in a future post, but in the meantime, take a gander. — — Exciting News: The NY Times Online reports that The Grocery Manufacturers Association is planning a three-year initiative to […]

September 16, 2011 | Also posted in Composting, Energy, Friday Buffet, Household, Personal | Comments closed

Dive! Giveaway

The kind folks at First Run Features have given me three copies of the dumpster diving documentary Dive! to pass along to you fine readers. Lucky you! I’m sure you’ll enjoy the film, as Dive! uses honesty and humor to illustrate the extent of retail food waste. We see director Jeremy Seifert and his freegan friends […]

August 10, 2011 | Also posted in Freegan | Comments closed

Revealing Letter

Gawker has a pretty interesting letter from a disgruntled former (Toronto) Whole Foods employee. It must be read with a grain or two of salt. But…it reveals some telling tidbits about that retailer and the grocery biz in general. Here are some of the letter’s sarcastic highlights: Oh, you throw out enough food to feed […]

July 25, 2011 | Posted in Supermarket | Comments closed

Loving Unlovely Produce

Epi-Log’s In Praise of Unlovely Produce has the best blog post title I’ve read in a long while. And its sentiment is dead on. The main message: Vegetables and fruits don’t always have to win swimsuit contests. Instead, the post preaches, taste should matter more than appearance. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen in the mainstream food chain. […]

July 13, 2011 | Posted in Supermarket | Comments closed

You In?

A package-free, zero-waste, crowd-sourced grocery store is in the works in Austin? Holy hyphens! The store, In.gredients, will open at some point in 2011, as long as their funding outreach progresses. I’m excited to see this store come to fruition, as it seems like a model for other grocers to aim for. I have one small caveat, […]

June 29, 2011 | Posted in Supermarket | Comments closed

NPR Spotlights Food Donation

NPR’s All Things Considered ran a fabulous feature on food donation last night, A Squash’s Journey (Sort of sounds like a kids book, no?) The story focuses on Walmart’s impressive food donation program. Specifically, it traces the, yes, journey of a squash and an ear of corn from the retail shelf to food bank recipients’ […]

June 24, 2011 | Also posted in Food Recovery, Personal | Comments closed