Supermarkets are Graded on Their Food Waste Diversion Efforts in a New Report

The Center for Biological Diversity and the "Ugly" Fruit and Veg Campaign recently teamed up to create a new report about how supermarkets in the U.S. are handling food waste. Titled “Supermarkets Fail to Make the Grade in Reducing Food Waste,” the report reveals that supermarkets are mediocre at reducing food waste.

The supermarkets were graded in three categories: how much public information a store shared about food waste, what a store was doing to prevent food waste and where a store’s discarded food went.

None of the 10 largest U.S. supermarkets included in the report received an A. Walmart ranked highest with a B, Kroger, Albertsons and Ahold Delhaize all received Cs, Costco, Publix, Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Target all received Ds and the German-based discount grocer ALDI received an F.

National Public Radio has more details:

Any dumpster diver can tell you: Grocery stores throw away a lot of food.

But food discarded off the shelf is just one way that grub gets trashed. There's other waste along a grocery store's supply chain—rejected crops at farms, for example— that's often overlooked. So The Center for Biological Diversity and The "Ugly" Fruit and Veg Campaign recently asked the 10 largest U.S. supermarkets how they handle food waste, and gave each store's efforts a letter grade.

Scores for each store appeared in the report, "Supermarkets Fail to Make the Grade in Reducing Food Waste," released Monday. Letter grades took three overarching categories into account: how much public information a store shared about food waste, what it was doing to prevent food waste, and where its discarded food went.

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