How we are tackling food waste
Food waste is an urgent environmental and social issue in Ireland. Retailers play an influential role in the supply chain, providing a link between producers and consumers. We participate with the Retail Action Group, an industry wide programme that guides businesses to measure and act upon food waste to deliver real change.
Together with our partners, we are committed to the UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 to halve per capita global food waste by 2030. This goal has vital importance to reduce the environmental impact of wasted food, and to help alleviate food poverty.
We have committed to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030 (relative to 2016 baseline). To achieve these commitments we are working hard to prevent waste in our operations and when waste does happen, we ensure we have partnerships to distribute surplus food to charities. We also work with our suppliers to minimise waste and support a range of industry initiatives.
• Aldi partnered with FoodCloud in 2014, and through this partnership we redistribute large volumes, and a great variety of surplus food to charities through our stores. Check out our partnership here.
• In 2020, Aldi Ireland & FoodCloud redistributed over 227,000 meals to charities across Ireland through both our stores and distribution centres. This is an additional 77,000 meals versus 2019.
• To date, Aldi has redistributed 2.23 million meals from surplus and donated food from distribution centres and stores equating to 900 tonnes and a saving of €2.7m to charity partners.
• We saw a huge surge in charity demand in 2020 due to the pandemic. Aldi Ireland was the first retail partner in Ireland to support FoodCloud with €50,000 donated as non-surplus stock to help meet this demand.
• We help our customers to reduce food waste by promoting the STOP Food Waste programme, funded under the EPA National Waste Prevention Programme (NWPP) in stores, on our social media, and in our in-store leaflets.
• Monitoring our food waste more closely and engaging with the right teams to identify waste hotspots, and clear priority actions for the business.
• Expanding our redistribution programme with FoodCloud to include food donations to community groups with a charitable purpose.
• Expanding our Christmas Freeze down of surplus stock to include a New Year’s Eve Freeze down.
• Rolling out 75% price reductions of food in stores that is near the end of its life to reduce wastage.
• Expanding our redistribution programme with FoodCloud to include weekends to donate even more food to local charities and community groups.