S1 Ep 8
Tackling Loose Produce food waste
What's the best way to tackle loose produce food waste?
Pity the organic avocado, damaged and bruised on its way to the shelf, "roughed up" on the shelf by shoppers, picked by mistake by the in-store pickers and then misrepresented at the self checkout.
Pity too all the other loose products in fresh, especially those with the shortest shelf life, most easily damaged and with other similar alternatives.
In this podcast, Colin Peacock is joined by Richard Thalemann to discuss how retailers are trying to reduce food waste by adopting new and different approaches to reduce the volume of "throws" from the loose category, including technologies to extend the shelf life, to reduce damages and to improve pick and scan accuracy.
Podcast summary
Loose produce food waste is the focus of this episode, as Colin Peacock and Richard Thaleman explore whether selling more items loose genuinely reduces waste in people’s homes.
They discuss retailer concerns around handling, quality, in-store productivity, and the “remainders” problem where customers pick the best-looking items and leave the rest.
The conversation also covers online picking challenges and why loose can be less convenient in smaller stores, before ending with a practical look at AI-powered smart scales for recognising produce and helping prevent shrink.
Cleaned transcript
Why loose produce food waste matters
COLIN:
Hello and welcome to the ECR Retail Loss Sell More and Lose Less podcast series. My name is Colin Peacock.
I work with a community of experts and academics who are keen to share their latest research findings and best practices. And every week or two in this series I’ll be joined by one of those experts and academics to discuss some of the very latest insights from our meetings and discussions and research of best practices.
This week I’m joined by Richard Thailman. He is the food waste advisor to the ECR Retail Loss Group and has had previous years working in the food industry, notably with Tesco.
And this week we’re talking about the good, the bad and the ugly of selling loose products in retail. Hey Richard how are you?
RICHARD:
Yeah I’m very well Colin, how are you?
COLIN:
Very good, very good.
What retailers said about loose produce food waste
COLIN:
We had a meeting recently around food waste and the topic was loose products—loose potatoes, loose tomatoes, beetroots, everything.
We had about 60 retailers on the call. We started off with a presentation from RAPP who were making the case, I think, for retailers to sell more loose and the idea that retailers should promote loose.
And I think what we heard on the call was a bit of concern from retailers about whether actually this was really going to lead to a reduction in the waste in the consumer’s home.
I’d like you to pick up on that and share your thoughts on what you heard from the retailers—whether this is a strategy that’s genuinely going to reduce food waste in the consumer home.
RICHARD:
First off, we need to recognise the fact that in the UK, total food waste—70% of it—comes from our homes.
So the education to consumers has always been about only buying what you need, planning your meals, and preparing your meals.
There is a definite need for loose in some instances where you’re only buying what you need. You can go into some supermarkets that may sell only a net of lemons and you only need one, and for sure the others are going to go off before you get to a point where you need to use them again.
But we also need to keep in the back of our mind what problem we’re trying to solve, because from consumer household waste, 41% of that food waste is not used in time, 25% is where they’ve prepared too much, and 28% is down to personal preference—for example where you may have planned the meal but then decide you want to have a takeaway on the way home from a late day at work.
So we have to bear that in mind and try and solve the problem of loose produce food waste.
But there is a definite need for loose items so that smaller families, individuals, and couples don’t need big pack items.
Of course, you have to remember some produce items may well need packaging for other purposes—for quality and preventing damage—but we need to find an alternative to plastic.
COLIN:
Yeah.
Retail challenges: handling, remainders, and decisions at end of day
COLIN:
Let’s come on to the retailer perspective, because we heard that loud and clear. We heard about some opportunities, but we also heard about some challenges.
What are some of the challenges you think we heard retailers sharing with us on selling food loose?
RICHARD:
There’s always going to be cost questions—whether they’re buying in bulk as loose or whether there’s a cost of packaging.
But there’s also the concern and barrier around waste at the end of it. You’ve got consumers picking and choosing what they want from loose, ending up with a tray of the stuff people don’t want at the end of the day.
Then you’ve got to make a decision: whether that gets reduced, whether it becomes waste, whether it gets redistributed.
The other thing is quality and maintaining that. Often in stores, because of time constraints, they’ll put the remainder of one tray on top of another tray, which may be of a newer date.
You’ve got to protect the quality for the consumer. There’s a lot more quality checking—would I buy it, would you buy it—colleagues in store will be looking at those products to decide when it’s at the end of its life or whether it can be reduced.
Having more loose products means you’ve got a lot more of that to do.
One of the barriers—which I don’t think actually came up—would be productivity and the cost of productivity in store.
COLIN:
You make this point about consumers selecting the ones they want. They’re more likely to select the ones that look the biggest or whatever, so you do end up with the remainders and probably that’s hard to sell.
Whereas if they were in bags, or in cut plastic boxes, or maybe a new material that is more eco-friendly, you’d imagine you probably have less loose produce food waste because the last pack of tomatoes or the last bag would still probably sell.
RICHARD:
Yeah.
Quality perception, shelf life, and customer trust
RICHARD:
To protect that quality perception from a retailer’s point of view, we’ve seen recently on pre-packed fruit and veg where they’ve removed the date and kept their own internal measure so they can still do that.
That sometimes goes beyond that date, so the consumer is getting less time at home in some instances, and that will be a reflection on quality from that retailer.
You have to be careful of that, especially with loose, because in some instances the packaging is there and it makes it last longer.
Without that, and if that rolls on in store, it might have a really short life at home, and that’ll have an impact on where they shop.
COLIN:
Yeah.
Online picking: speed targets versus choosing the best items
COLIN:
I also think about online picking, and I think that was another area of concern. It’s quite a challenge for the online pickers to pick the right quality, perhaps at the right speed.
RICHARD:
Yeah, of course. They’re expected—and rightly so—to pick the longest date for the customer.
So they’re going to be expected to root around loose products and find the best products, and they’re on a target of pick rate, so they’ve got to do that pretty quickly still.
Some of that will slip through the net. It’s not easy to do right.
If you’ve got a tray full of onions, they’re not going to spend their time rooting around at the bottom to try and find the best quality or the ones perceived to have the longest date. They’ll just take and assume the rotation is correct and take them from the top.
So that may fall away. I think it’s a valid point, Colin.
COLIN:
Yeah, and then that’s again productivity.
Convenience stores and why loose can feel less convenient
COLIN:
I’m mindful that most of the retailers on the call—whether they’re in Australia or America—have big shops and small shops.
I just wonder, what are some of the challenges around loose produce food waste in a smaller shop?
RICHARD:
Small shops are referred to as convenience stores—it’s exactly that. People want to quickly pop in on the way home from work, or run down the road because they’ve forgotten something, and conveniently go and get it.
Loose products don’t always offer that. They’ll probably just want to pick up a pack of something.
And if customers have been taking all the ones they want and you’re left with the ones that nobody really wants, that’s no longer a convenient shop.
AI smart scales: recognising produce and helping prevent shrink
COLIN:
Every meeting we have has got to have AI in it somewhere, and we saw quite an interesting example of AI with some sort of smart scales in the produce area for one of the retailers.
What were your thoughts on that particular technology?
RICHARD:
I think it’s pretty clever technology.
The concern with any kind of scales at the moment is having to look up products. Even at self-serve checkouts, looking up products can take some time to find where they are.
So technology where it recognises what it is just makes it really easy.
There was feedback from a customer that said it was brilliant because it wasn’t even advertised as AI—you just put it on the scale and it recognised what he had.
It kind of speaks for itself, is what that customer was saying.
I think it works pretty well. That was in the produce department, so they have it there.
Maybe the future is that you combine those cameras with the cameras you have at self-serve checkout, which then serve a number of different purposes as well as identifying products.
And of course it helps customers and it helps prevent shrink.
COLIN:
Yeah, that’s a nice one.
Closing thoughts
COLIN:
Look, we’ve got many more meetings coming up, so many more chances for me to have you share your thoughts on those meetings.
But really appreciate your thoughts and sharing this with us, Richard, and we’ll see you next time.
RICHARD:
Lovely. Thanks Colin.
Either way, see you next time. Thank you again.
