Update on our progress to halve food waste

When Tesco first started on its food waste journey, transparency was key. We were the first major retailer to publish food waste data and we have continued to do so annually ever since. It’s long been said ‘what gets measured gets managed’. Target, Measure, Act is more than a task, it is a mindset and a culture when it comes to eliminating food waste. 

Action across our operations

Today we published a progress report on efforts to eliminate food waste. The accumulation of interventions across our supply chain, own operations, communities and our customers’ homes has driven real change. We’re proud of the progress that has been made, in many cases by thousands of colleagues, in our shops, distribution centres and at our suppliers, all proactively taking steps to reduce food waste every day. Key highlights include:

• Introducing our Reduced in Price, Just as Nice reduced-to-clear sections in over 300 stores, helping to prevent waste in the first place and offering customers great value
• Encouraging 106 Tesco suppliers to adopt ‘Target, Measure, Act’ by reporting their food waste as part of our work to halve food waste in our supply chain by 2030
• Establishing Tesco Exchange as an online marketplace matching surplus stock with demand from suppliers across the Tesco supply chain
• Supporting over 5,500 charities from our stores and distribution centres, providing unsold food to those who need it most
• Saving 107m meals through our Colleague Shop since its launch in 2018

We continue to work closely with food redistribution groups and charities to donate as much surplus food to local communities as possible from our stores, and with our external stakeholders to drive wider industry progress and share learnings together. You can read more about how we have shared over 166 million meals of surplus food with local communities here.

Target, Measure, Act means transparency and accountability for waste

Target, Measure, Act has been central to our progress. That is why it is important we are transparent when we find a problem.

We have terminated our relationship with our food waste processor in the UK, following an internal review which showed that food which we believed was being processed for animal feed was in fact going to anaerobic digestion. While anaerobic digestion can have a role in recovery of energy and avoids food going to landfill, under the Food Waste Hierarchy, we count food going to anaerobic digestion as waste. 

Removing animal feed from our reported numbers for 2022/23 would result in a Group food waste reduction of 18% against our baseline, significantly lower than our previously reported reduction of 45%. As we had worked with our former processor over a number of years, we believe it is right to exclude animal feed from our data. We are therefore withdrawing our previously reported food waste data, and we expect our reduction this year will be similarly affected. 

The donation of unsold food to community groups and shared with colleagues through our Colleague Shop in the UK are both unaffected as is the progress we are making to halve food waste elsewhere in the Group.

We will publish our latest position, which will be based on the result achieved at the end of the current financial year, as part of our usual reporting cycle. 

Working to halve food waste 

Our ambition to halve food waste is unchanged. We are now reviewing our plans and putting in place the building blocks to return us to where we want to be on waste reduction and over the coming months, we will share our actions to help us make progress towards our target. 

Today our food waste report sets out how we and industry can accelerate efforts to eliminate food waste, ensuring as much surplus food as possible is redistributed to humans. You can read more about these ideas in the report, including:

• Keep food moving up the food waste hierarchy, ensuring as much surplus as possible is redistributed
• Embrace new technology, ideas and innovations, for example using insects fed on food waste to replace soy-based animal feed
• Bring transparency to the issue, helping growers to take action and supporting mandatory reporting of food waste
• Make reducing household food waste a collective national mission

Our food waste report demonstrates how far we’ve come on our food waste journey, and while we’re proud of our progress, we are clear that there remains more to do.