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There are five key reasons why not all recoverable food is saved. Barriers to recovering food
1. Financial and labour cost
Cost per kg recovered Protein Sweets and snacks Dairy and alternatives Cupboard staples Fruit and vegetables
Finding finance If savings cannot be found by reducing waste as outlined in ‘Part 1. Reduce’, and there are no relevant ESG initiatives available to fund recovery, there are still a number of alternative funding options: Sainsbury’s and Greencore spotted the opportunity to use some surplus manufacturing capacity to create additional food at as low cost as possible. They then generated the funds to pay to make and redirect the food with an on- pack promotion which generated enough to produce one million ready meals. Multiple retailers, including Tesco, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose have participated in the ‘Let’s make a meal of it’ fundraising campaign, in which money is raised at the till to spend on sourcing and redistributing meals from surplus food.
£1.06
92p 58p 35p 31p 28p 26p 17p
Companies can be wary of the ongoing costs and commitments. In particular, where KPIs are measured in detail, there can be concerns about adding extra processes to already stretched teams. To recover food, there is almost always an investment required in people resources, requiring leadership agreement and in-depth understanding of down time and resourcing. But there is not always a huge cost. Research enabled by our AI-powered cost modelling software finds fruit and vegetables and cupboard staples have a relatively low cost to recover as they do not need to be chilled or packaged. Other categories, in particular proteins, are more expensive due to the operational complexity – but even then there are processes to ensure that this can be achieved at a relatively low cost.
Frozen food
Starch Drinks
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In fact, our calculations show that the cost to recover one meal is on average 17p. This is a third of what the same plate would cost to manufacture from scratch (50p). The difference in cost is because for the recovered food, there is no retailer or manufacturer margin, and money has already been spent preparing the food regardless of whether it is recovered or not. This offsets the additional labour or packaging required for extraction and distribution.
FAQ: Are there any items Felix won’t take?
Apart from alcohol, there are no blanket bans and Felix explores the merits of each potential donation.
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