Years ago, I was an assistant store director for a big grocery retailer. Typically, I was the closing store manager and worked the evening shift at a particular store I was assigned in 2012. I had a new employee who worked in the produce department named Tim (not his real name for the sake of privacy).
Tim was a Vietnamese immigrant, having just come to the states recently to work and start a family. He immediately formed a bond with me as I was also Vietnamese. My parents came to the United States after the Vietnam War so I wasn’t an immigrant, but I had always felt an immediate kinship with any immigrants in this country.
Tim was a very hard worker. Every shift, he greeted every employee and customer with an enthusiastic smile. Detailed and thorough, Tim was the epitome of a model retail employee. Tim also frequently worked closing shifts for the produce department so conversations with him were common.
Tim told me he had kids and wanted to work hard for them. He saw me as a role model and I eagerly took him under my wing. Overall, I thought Tim was a great guy with huge potential. Maybe I could groom him to be a manager one day!
Caught.
As the manager of store operations, I dealt with both loss prevention issues and HR issues. Each store had anywhere from 200–400 employees. One day, a loss prevention employee informed me that an employee was stealing merchandise from us. Stealing from the company was a termination offense and taken very seriously.
I asked the loss prevention employee who he had suspected of stealing. He said, “Tim from the produce department.” My heart fell.
I thought to myself, “There must be a mistake. There’s no way it could be Tim.”
The loss prevention employee proceeded to show me the video from the camera feed:
The video was in black and white, but I could make Tim out clearly. He was completing his nightly closing duties per produce department rules. This included dumping all trash and waste. However, Tim wasn’t chucking everything into the garbage chute. Tim was inspecting every object he was looking at.
He was inspecting every fruit and vegetable before either discarding it or placing it in a shopping cart nearby. After Tim was done with the trash, he wheeled out his cart of goods through the backdoor and loaded everything into his car. Tim was stealing food.
I asked the Loss Prevention employee if he knew how long this had been going on. The employee responded, “Weeks.”
I shook my head and said, “I’ll need the recordings for the investigation.”
***
Food.
When I sat Tim down in the office to confront him on the matter, I felt a knot in my stomach. Tim admitted to taking produce from the company for the past few weeks. At first, he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He said he was only taking home the produce that customers didn’t want or had picked over: Expired food, bruised apples, frayed lettuce, etc.
Tim thought it was wasteful to throw away perfectly good food. It bothered him a great deal. After working so many night shifts, he had done his fair share of throwing away food as part of the nightly closing duties.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
He had just immigrated from Vietnam, impoverished, where food wasn’t wasted or fussed about. I saw Tim’s point. My parents didn’t have much in Vietnam, growing up either. While raising us in the US, they were firm in their insistence for my brothers and me to finish our plates, declaring that wasting food was a sin.
Waste.
When Russian President Boris Yeltsin walked around his first American supermarket in 1989, he was surprised at the immense assortment of stocked food. But I’m sure he would have been shocked by how much food Americans throw away.
According to the FDA, “food waste is estimated at between 30–40 percent of the food supply.”
In a country where 37 million people, including 11 million children, are going hungry, Americans throw away food in massive numbers due to perceived spoilage and misunderstanding of expiration labels.
Why do grocery stores throw away so much?
From a business perspective, it makes sense why grocery stores are so wasteful when it comes to keeping produce in stock. A grocery store is a business and a business’s main goal is to generate sales. If customers don’t buy the product, the store doesn’t get the sale.
A beautiful produce aisle with perfect, vibrant fruit and vegetables is appealing to a customer. A shopped produce aisle with shady-looking fruit and vegetables is not. We’ve all been guilty of putting the slightly discolored apple back for another favorable apple. Imagine the next person that shops the apples doing this as well. And so forth.
The produce employees understand this better than anyone else. To sell products successfully, each fruit needs to look pristine and identical to one another. Part of a produce clerk’s job is to “cull” unappealing produce since they’re less likely to catch someone’s attention. Most of the time, the produce is suitable for consumption except for a few aesthetic imperfections. Not able to sell the imperfect produce, the grocery stores are forced to discard of any picked-over product or risk actual spoilage.
Reducing Food Waste.
“133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food was wasted in 2010” — USDA Economic Research Service
Some grocery retailers are making concentrated efforts to tackle the issue. In France, a major grocery chain, Intermarche, launched a campaign to help reduce food waste. They featured imperfect produce that was nicknamed “inglorious fruits”, selling 1.2 million tons and increasing store traffic by 24%. In 2018, Kroger launched its Zero Waste initiative to aim to eliminate food waste by 2025 by distributing surplus inventory to food banks.
However, the food waste problem doesn’t entirely rest on the grocery industry’s shoulders. There exists a serious lack of education around general food safety among consumers. Unsold bananas with brown spots are still good to eat. The sell-by date doesn’t mean that the food is bad at the numbered date. And the interior of ground beef may be brown due to lack of oxygen, not spoilage.
Photo by Lucian Alexe on Unsplash
Research says that four in 10 people admitted that they do not know who to look for guidance on how to reduce food waste. There exists a gap in the industry to help educate consumers here.
Additionally, some entrepreneurs are tackling the issue by creating “zero-waste grocery stores.” In 2012, a local grocery store called In.gredients opened in Austin, TX. They had one mission: No Waste.
In.gredients aimed to change consumer habits by having consumers bring their own containers and fill up on bulk products such as nuts and olive oil. But changing the entire market’s remains a big ask for a single local grocery store. Burdened with high costs, In.Gredients ended up closing in 2018.
Still, the opportunity is there and many current grocery retailers and new entrepreneurs are stepping up to the challenge. Processes, technologies, and supply chain improvements are key to reducing food waste.
“A World Economic Forum (WEF) report forecasted that food losses will be reduced by 85 million tons” by 2030. Additionally, ReFED rolled out a roadmap to commit to reducing US food waste by 20% over the next decade. The report looks at every possible touchpoint of the food distribution chain from farmers to government and non-profits to present solutions. But until then, it’s beholden to us, as consumers, to be more conscious about what food we throw away at home or look over at the store.
***
Doing Our Part.
Tim ended up being fired by me. According to corporate company rules, he wasn’t supposed to take products without consulting management, even food waste. My hands were tied on the matter.
I felt terrible. I shared my condolences for Tim, saying that he was a great employee to work with. I wished him luck in his future endeavors and offered him coaching advice if he needed help on finding a job. He gladly took me up on my offer a few weeks later, asking for interview tips. He ended up securing a better paying job at another company.
I still think about Tim though. Though I regret my decision, I learned a valuable lesson. The experience opened my eyes to the bigger impact of food waste and how problematic it is.
I wasn’t fully aloof to the fact that the grocery industry threw away food. What was eye-opening was the realization that I and everyone I knew was complicit with contributing to food waste. Food waste won’t change unless there are some structural changes and massive changes in consumer behavior. But I remain hopeful.
If entrepreneurs, retail grocery, farmers, government, non-profits, product managers, and consumers put their minds to the task, the fight against food waste and hunger can be won. As consumers, we all need to be more self-aware about what we buy, pick over, and throw away when it comes to food.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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