Waitrose has begun a new initiative to turn surplus food unfit for human consumption into animal feed, in a bid to reduce food waste.
According to reporting by The Grocer, this will rollout in the form of a six-month trial, with damaged or leftover food organised into colour-coded bags and taken to the upmarket retailers depots.
Store staff will be provided with hand scanners to direct them to the correct coloured bag, which will include bakery, fruit and veg, dairy, juice or meat and fish products.
Food waste company, Resource will then collect this food and turn it into animal feed or petfood.
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However, food which has gone past its expiry date will not be included in the trial, and anything not suitable to be made into feed will go to anaerobic digestion to produce biofertiliser.
Currently underway across 20 Waitrose stores, this is set to rollout in 75 within coming weeks and could be implemented permenantly, dependent on whether the trial is a success.
Waitrose senior environment manager, Ben Thomas told The Grocer: “In addition to addressing the root causes of waste in our shops, we are trialling the backhaul of surplus food that cannot be consumed by humans to animal feed where it will go back into the human food chain.
“If successful, we hope this will make a significant contribution towards our commitment to reducing food waste by 50% by 2023.”
As part of the trial, all packaging from the food products will also be processed to remove microplastics.
This follows on from the supermarkets sustainable plastic announcement last week, which will see soft plastic recycling launched in 295 of its stores in a bid to offer customers more ways to recycle.
