Bringing our potato suppliers together to help us reduce food waste

Tesco bring together two suppliers to prevent wasting perfectly edible potatoes, as part of our work to reduce food waste and tackle food poverty.

We’ve promised that no edible food will go to waste at Tesco, from farm to fork. It’s a promise that means a lot to us – in this day and age, when people are going hungry, it just isn’t acceptable to be wasting food.

That’s why we work hard with our suppliers to use all of their crops so that wherever possible, nothing edible goes to waste.

Reducing food waste

You can see this in our work on potatoes. Potatoes come in all shapes and sizes and previously some of the extremely “wonky” ones would get left in the field. We’ve made some big changes to address this, and with our Perfectly Imperfect range and our farm brands we now take more potatoes than ever before. But we wanted to go further, so we brought our grower Branston together with our ready meal supplier Samworths to use those “wonky” spuds as mash. Potatoes don’t have to be beautiful to taste lovely.

Helping suppliers use all the crop

We buy all of Branston’s potato crop with most going into our potato ranges. The rest are peeled and sent to Samworths to be mashed and used in our own brand ready meals. This increases the amount of crop used and saves edible produce being ploughed back into the field. It also secures a consistent supply of great mash for our customers.

We take 1 potato, 2 potato, 3 potato, MORE.