Our data at The Cool Down shows consumers hate food waste — especially when they read about restaurants and grocery stores tossing out perfectly good produce when prices are high and 44 million Americans are food insecure.

On the flip side, when grocery stores get it right, millions of our readers pay attention. This got us thinking: Could reducing food waste be a growth driver for grocery stores?

To explore this issue, we pulled from our proprietary data stack to test how grocery chains can engage consumers around food waste initiatives. Plus, we held exclusive conversations with supermarket chain Albertsons and food-surplus startup Flashfood to see how these ideas look in practice.

How can tackling food waste turn into a great business strategy?

The Cool Down has driven over 12 million page views to our stories about businesses and food waste. External data reiterates that the majority of consumers feel stores and supermarkets should do more to help reduce food waste.

But here’s a dirty little secret: Most food waste happens at home, not at the supermarket. Consumer food waste adds up to more than 48% of surplus food waste in the U.S.

Grocery stores, on the other hand, are doing a better job on this front. A recent report showed that over the past four years, the industry has increased the rate of unsold food being donated by 20%.

But do customers know that? Spreading the word about what grocery stores are doing to reduce waste — and how customers can participate — is a big task and a bigger opportunity.

😬 The task: Educate shoppers on how they can reduce food waste in their homes. For example, Costco alone has about 130 million members — that’s a lot of individuals who could minimize chicken bake leftovers.

😃 The opportunity: Build brand loyalty by leading the way. For example, a local Kroger recently handled a freezer outage by providing 60,000 meals to the community, reducing food waste in the process.

So what would happen if grocery chains could mobilize their millions of shoppers — in addition to improving their food waste reduction processes? Just take a look at Albertsons, which is leveraging its sustainability strategy to connect with customers, boost the bottom line, and keep a bunch of food out of landfills.

What’s more, our exclusive data illustrates the white space around food waste initiatives that grocery stores can use to their competitive advantage. More on that below.

Our data: What do consumers think about America’s food waste problem?

We ran an audience poll from our proprietary data stack to find out which group consumers think plays the biggest role in reducing food waste: grocery stores, restaurants, individuals, or the government.

The 40% of respondents choosing “grocery stores” suggests a meaningful opportunity for these chains to engage customers and cultivate brand loyalty by positioning themselves as part of the solution to food waste — which they are.

Meanwhile, the relative underperformance of “individuals” as a response — when individual consumers do, in fact, account for most of the food waste in the U.S. — suggests a meaningful opportunity to educate mainstream consumers about the true causes of and solutions to the problem.

Diving deeper into the results brings up a few interesting nuances:

• It’s significant that “grocery stores” was the most common vote from respondents reading stories about wasteful grocery store practices (which you can see in the outrage split that describes the article's focus).
• That strong “grocery” vote from the outrage split — combined with the more balanced vote in the sustainability split — suggests that consumer attitudes about waste can be influenced by messaging.
• Additionally, the much smaller vote for “individuals” across all contexts suggests that even sustainably minded consumers can benefit from additional education about the problem and solutions to it.

Meanwhile, our weekly A/B test on how grocery chains can effectively promote their food waste initiatives adds another layer.

Messaging centered on “fighting food waste” produced higher attention and engagement scores, while the smaller but consistent responses for “fighting hunger” suggest that both initiatives around food waste draw consumers’ attention and inspire action.

See full results →

TCD LABS research is powered by our proprietary GreenScreen data stack. You can access historical GreenScreen tests and polls — and commission your own bespoke experiments — here and here.

DOING IT RIGHT

How Albertsons is tackling food waste by bringing the message home

As the second-largest supermarket chain in the U.S., Albertsons knows that sustainability is a good business strategy. Less packaging means lower costs, reduced energy in stores means a lower power bill — you know the drill — and reducing food waste can also boost margins.

To explore that topic, we spoke with Suzanne Long, the grocery chain’s chief sustainability and transformation officer. Long gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of how the Fortune 500 company keeps food out of landfills.

Here are the big takeaways:

• Uber arriving in one minute: Albertsons recently teamed up with Uber to get excess food from its supermarkets to nonprofits and food banks. “Think of it almost like an Uber Eats delivery, but for food donation,” Long told us.
• Would you do this at home? “Some of the inefficiency that we [in the grocery industry] actually see in our operations … comes from some of those things that we would never do in our own home,” Long said. (Here’s what that looks like.)
• Power in numbers: Albertsons is fighting food waste in each store, but its millions of customers can make that impact exponentially bigger.

“That’s where the power of the opportunity is,” Long said. “Not only for us to fix the waste … but to help educate those 35 million consumers … to figure out how they can reduce their own food waste."

⏭️ Next week: We’ll be talking with Staples about its strategy to become the destination for recycling 2.0.

Learn more →

Meet the startup offering half-price groceries and a big sustainability solution

Flashfood, the app offering nearly expired or imperfect groceries for up to 50% off, has become a social media sensation, with shoppers sharing their bargains and food creations on TikTok and Instagram.

The company just revealed exclusively to The Cool Down that it has hit a huge milestone: diverting 100 million pounds of food from landfills while saving customers more than $250 million on groceries and delivering 83 million meals across North America.

“Our mission is feeding families instead of landfills,” Flashfood CEO Nicholas Bertram told us. “And that’s all because we think that people should be able to eat well without compromise.”

Go deeper with the full article below.

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