Food Waste: What are the right KPI’s for the store?

In this upcoming food waste working group meeting, we will be returning to the dilemma around the setting of the metrics / KPI’s for the stores and how retailers are looking to find the right balance between protecting profitability while doing the right thing with unsold food. From supply chain surplus to store-level reality, our sense is that the issue isn’t about retailers intent, which our global report, written by Professor Arzum Akkas, on the exiting of surplus food in retail clearly describes. Click here. In fact, it is more about consistency of execution under pressure. Reduced payroll, stretched teams, and competing priorities can quickly undermine even the best markdown strategies, while at the same time, charities are not always able to collect on time the surplus food they have been donated, leading to surplus food potentially being exited in the wrong way

When these processes go wrong, the risk to the retailers brand reputation is high, with voices in the UK such as The Food Waste Inspector using Instagram to expose real world examples where still edible food ends up in bins and dumpsters, sometimes without a final markdown stickers. Given hunger is a global problem, going forward, there will probably be more food waste inspectors with access to social media searching retailers bins and highlighting retailers process breakdowns, in all parts of the world, perhaps even more so given the evidenced impact of the UK Food Waste Inspector.

In this meeting, we will explore how leading retailers are closing that execution gap—through smarter forecasting, dynamic markdowns, and stronger in-store accountability—to maximise sell-through before donation becomes necessary. Charity partnerships and donation strategies do matter, but they should be the result of a well-run process and arguably not a fallback.

So here’s a key question for the discussion: should retailers fully link accountability to KPIs that measure and incentivise waste reduction at the store level to drive consistency or does that create unintended behaviours?

This meeting is for retailers, producers and academics only.