Reducing surplus food in your shop allows you to increase your profit, fight food waste and decrease your waste management costs. Here are our tips...How to reduce surplus food in shops

Reducing surplus food in your shop is a noble goal for many reasons: it allows you to increase your profit, fight food waste and potentially decrease your waste management costs.

Regardless of how small or big your business is, figuring out the first steps towards lessening the unsold food in your shop can be challenging. To help you out, in this post, we’ll be talking about how to reduce surplus food in shops.

There are 3 key phases in reducing your food waste:

1. Tracking your shop’s surplus food
2. Learning and discovering your options
3. Implementing your new processes 

TRACKING SURPLUS FOOD IN YOUR SHOP

Improve inventory tracking where you can

How you track your inventory can make a big difference in your forecasting, allowing you to order more accurate amounts of what you need. If you use POS to track, it’s recommended that you additionally check inventory by hand to account for theft and spoilage. Sticking to a regular schedule can allow you to track patterns over time.

Waste tracking

Along with tracking your inventory, tracking your waste will help you to understand what isn’t selling the way you expect it to and why. Some waste management companies provide you with report breakdowns of your landfill and recycling waste, so that over time, you can see differences when you begin to introduce more waste prevention techniques.

LEARNING HOW TO REDUCE SURPLUS FOOD IN YOUR SHOP

Understand date labels

There are two main types of food date labels: ‘use by’ and ‘best before’. ‘Use by’ is a strict date that says exactly when the product should be consumed by to ensure buyer safety. ‘Best before’, on the other hand, is a guideline from the manufacturer highlighting until when the food will be at its best. There is no legislation against selling food past its best before date but the FSAI recommends letting consumers know that they are purchasing food past this date.

Comprehending these labels will allow you to understand when to discount or throw away your surplus food.

Carry out food waste training with employees

Profit loss is just one reason to care about food waste. 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions are related to food waste and Project Drawdown identified reducing food waste as the number 1 way to fight climate change.

Pulling together some info from sources including Too Good To Go, the EPA, Project Drawdown and Bord Bia can help you to underline the gravity of this issue to your team, getting them on board on your food waste prevention mission.

Read our post on how to encourage your team to reduce food waste

IMPLEMENTING PROCESSES TO REDUCE UNSOLD FOOD IN YOUR SHOP

Yellow-stickering food near to its use by date

Popular with large supermarkets, ‘yellow stickers’ or ad-hoc discounting allows you to quickly lower the price of items to sell through your product: for example, softening fruit, perishables like milk and products past their best before date.

Sell your ‘wonky’ fruit and veg as a special item

For many shops, less attractive fruit or veg can go unsold. By bundling bruised, misshapen or smaller fruit and veg together as a ‘wonky box’ at a discount, you can encourage your customers to fight food waste with you.

Resell your unsold food