Within the framework of the Week Against Food Waste, Lidl has announced its commitment to reduce food waste by 30% by 2025 and 50% by 2030, taking 2020 as the base year to make this calculation.
The company implements different preventive and reactive measures, setting its own objectives that are in line with the provision set by the European Union to reduce food waste (Directive (EU) 2018/98 / EC) and to meet the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).
To achieve its objectives, the company already has several preventive and reactive measures in place. One of its most outstanding preventive measures is its own business model, which allows it to carry out efficient planning and management of its assortment with optimized and adjusted orders.
This guarantees that the establishments always have the items that will be sold, minimizing the excess of product stock in salesrooms and warehouses. In addition, the company carries out a daily control of the expiration dates of the products it's selling, applying a 30% to 50% discount on items that are nearing their expiration date, thus enhancing their sale.
They also have after-sales resources, looking for an outlet for those products that are generally close to their expiration date, have no commercial value, and consequently are not suitable for sale, but are suitable for consumption.
In this sense, on a permanent and continuous basis throughout the year, Lidl donates products in 75% of its stores, cooperating with some 40 local NGOs, with the firm commitment to continue increasing its collaborations until it covers 100% of its centers of sale by the end of 2021. In the last year alone, the company donated more than two million kilos of food.
Likewise, it looks for a second life for the surplus of certain products, such as its meat, which are destined to be used to make pet food, biogas, or energy recovery, thus avoiding more waste.
In addition, all of Lidl logistics platforms on the peninsula works with Zero Waste, which certifies the centralized management, classification, valuation, and recovery of the waste generated in the warehouses and in the stores, one more milestone that guarantees greater control of all waste, including food.
The company also has a list of recipes on how to manage waste on its own website. Finally, last June Lidl became the first and only supermarket to achieve Bureau Veritas certification on the management system to minimize food waste (SG-MDA) in all its stores and logistics centers in Spain.
Source: revistainforetail.com
