Tackling Food Waste with Olio
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Published 3 Sep 2024 in Raising Awareness
Food waste is a serious issue and something that we, as a Society, have been working hard to tackle for several years. So far, the hard work done across our Food stores has meant we have reduced the number of items going to waste from them by 21% since 2019.
But we now want to go even further to hit our target of reducing food waste across our stores by a full 25% by the end of this year against what it was in 2019. To help us get there we have recently partnered with Olio, an app designed to help local businesses and people alleviate waste and assist local communities free access food and other items, which would otherwise have been thrown away.
Lydney Food
Coleford Food
Olio’s Food Waste Heroes have been visiting a select number of our Food stores since July, and in the first three weeks had already collected over 9,300 items, preventing them from ending up as waste and helping to feed more than 200 households with the equivalent of 4,600 meals!
An Olio order from Lydney Food
This partnership isn’t just about helping the community and limiting our food waste to hit that 25% reduction target, it’s also a major way we can help reduce our carbon footprint. By reducing the items that would be thrown away, over 8,400kg of CO2 emissions have been saved, the equivalent of taking 28,500 car miles off the road. All of this is helping the work we are doing across all our stores, offices and headquarters to reduce our carbon emissions wherever possible.
Neither can we, Saasha!
So far, the Olio partnership has been carried out in a select number of stores only, to enable us to trial the concept. We will now review the overall findings from this trial to see if we can extend this Olio solution to any further stores in the future, working with our Senior Food Retail team. A big thank you to all our colleagues who have already helped with this important work and for those interested in helping even further and volunteering with Olio, you can find out more here.
Let's continue doing good together to serve our communities.