After researching wasted food at grocery stores for some time, I felt I wasn’t getting the full picture. To move past food companies’ rhetoric and get a clear picture of the amount of food supermarkets throw away, I decided to get a first-hand look.
In September, 2006 I began working in the produce department at a large grocery chain. In addition to learning exactly what foods were tossed, I sought to understand why an industry with wafer-thin profit margins and advanced software systems still throws out tons of food each year. Follow the saga with these posts:
The Produce Project (intro) The Produce Project: Day 1–Packaged Waste
The Produce Project: Day 1–Training
The vegetables pictured here are the kind of produce the store “culls,” or throws 
away because of imperfections. As a culling guideline, I was told to toss a fruit or vegetable if I wouldn’t buy it as a shopper. Having one dark or soft spot meant it was trash. The same held if it was wrinkly or unusual looking. Uniformity and perfection were the ideals.
After reading about your first 4 days as the produce guy at a supermarket I was hoping you would talk about what you had to go through to get the culled produce to be donated to food shelters or soup kitchens. This is something that I am interested in getting involved in, but am curious about some of the excuses that I may run up against and if there are any regulations out there about the donated foods.
Thanks for creating such an informative site. I look forward to reading more about what you’ve done and what you’ve discovered and using it to decrease waste in a big way.
Wow, it’s amazing how much perfectly good food goes to waste. Hope you have an update.
THE COLD CUTS WOMAN AT KROGER
told me she’d thrown three cooked chickens
& two turkey breasts plus the leftover
prepped spaghetti & deviled eggs
into a dumpster out back of the store last night
told me she’d once worked for Acme Food Service
where a mountain of scraps met the trash every
day but her boss let her bring in her grandkids
for meatloaf & mashed potatoes twice a week
told me she’d given up hope at Kroger
knowing her coworkers went home pinched
it was cold last night when she dumped the stuff
the wind caught a cold in her heart
Wow, food waste poetry! Thank you for sharing, James.
i know first hand the waste from grocery stores as i work at a local chain store. it breaks my heart to throw out grocery carts full of out of date product that is still edible, but our local food bank no longer picks it up.
update: we finally have a church that is picking up day old food. it is only the weekends, but its better than throwing it out.
Couldn’t there be a company
where they pick up those fruits
and vegetables and dry them
and bag them so people
can eat dried fruits
and dried vegetables used for
soups and etc.?
One more fact about grocery stores. It has become popular to have the salad and fruit bars, the soup bars, olive bars, as well as the hot food self serve bars…ALL of this is wasted food and can not be donated. Rightly so, the Health Department regulates this because of the handeling process (open to public).
Ughh.. what a waste! Either compost it or let the employees take some home for dinner!
Since seeking out sources of culled produce, from Maines and Wegmans, CHOW has increased the amount of fresh(ish) produce sent out to its over 50 soup kitchens ten-fold. That means, every month, there is an additional 12,000-15,000 pounds of fruits and vegetables in the bellies of Broome County, thanks to the Produce Project.
Peace and Love,
Dan