Series 3 Episode 10
Winning Hearts and Minds: Why engaged colleagues waste less food
The stores that waste the least food usually have one thing in common: engaged colleagues. Get that right and waste can fall by 20 to 30%, but it is hard to build and easy to lose.
In this episode of Sell More Lose Less, Colin Peacock talks to food waste expert Richard Thalemann about why people treat food differently at work than at home, and the cognitive dissonance of caring about waste while being measured on sales. They discuss why the emotional pull of charity donation rarely reaches the markdown gun, the risk of normalising surplus, and why food waste champions fade unless the role is refreshed. The takeaway on store colleague engagement: make it easy, move it upstream, and measure it.
Podcast summary
Store colleague engagement is the quiet variable behind some of the best food waste results in retail. Two stores can run the same systems and the same ranges, yet one wastes far less than the other, and the difference often comes down to how engaged the colleagues are. In this episode of Sell More Lose Less, Colin Peacock is joined by Richard Thalemann, the food waste expert supporting ECR Retail Loss and a 30 year veteran of Tesco and retail, to look at why engagement matters and why it is so hard to sustain.
Research has shown that stores with the most engaged associates can deliver 20 to 30% lower waste, through better recording, better rotation, well managed donations and markdowns applied at the right time. But engagement is fragile. Colin and Richard explore why people treat food differently at home and at work, the cognitive dissonance of caring about waste while being measured on sales, and why the emotional pull of charity donation rarely reaches the markdown gun. They also weigh the limits of donation, the risk of normalising surplus, and how this connects to wider work on food waste and engaging store associates.
Store colleague engagement and food waste: the full conversation
Why engagement drives lower waste
COLIN:
Hello, my name is Colin Peacock. I’m leading this Sell More, Lose Less podcast, and today we’re with one of our experts from retail, Richard Thalemann, who has over 30 years of experience in food waste and retail, having worked at Tesco and other places. Today’s podcast focuses on the role that engaged store associates and managers can play in reducing food waste in the retail store. We have seen from previous research that stores with more engaged associates deliver lower waste numbers, 20% or 30% lower levels of waste. We think that’s because there’s better recording of food waste, better rotation, the processes around donations are managed more effectively, and markdowns are applied at the right time. You see it in the variation across retail estates. If you’ve got 2,000 stores, some will be great at food waste, some less good, and a lot will be in the middle. But the differentiating factor tends to come down to the store associates and their engagement. So Richard, what’s on top of your mind?
RICHARD:
Good morning, Colin. Winning the hearts and minds of colleagues was always something I was passionate about in my time in retail, and it’s not an easy thing to do. What we learned is that people treat food differently at home versus at work. At home there’s a personal, emotional and visible tie that gets you to think about whether you’re going to throw food away or use up the leftovers. At work it’s more procedural, abstract and operational, so there’s always something that gets in the way, because something else is more important, sales or availability.
The bit that really resonated was the cognitive dissonance: the statement “I care about waste, but I’m measured on sales.” That pushes and stretches people, and we know colleagues are stretched from pillar to post through sickness or structural changes. So all of these things have to be made as simple as possible to make sure they get done.
Donation, markdowns and the upstream problem
RICHARD:
Retailers are doing a lot around winning hearts and minds on redistribution to charities. If you get the colleague to meet the charity at the front door and hand over the donation, you’re more emotionally connected to it, and you’ll make sure it’s done. The issue is that doesn’t help reduce food waste. The harder question is, how do you emotionally connect people to actually reduce food waste? Unfortunately those colleagues often don’t have the autonomy to reduce the waste further upstream. They can only play their part at the end of the day, when they have surplus.
COLIN:
Your point is well made, because you do see some retailers where there’s a real passion for donating. But it’s somewhat of a failure upstream that’s caused that. We’ve got surplus food in the store. Why have we got surplus food? And why have we got unsold food? These are two important questions. On the unsold food, that same emotional connection doesn’t always carry through to the markdown gun, because sometimes we see pretty low levels of compliance with the markdown routines.
RICHARD:
You have to make these things really easy for colleagues to carry out. If somebody is off sick and you need someone else to take over, they’ve got to be able to do it. That’s why most people are now on more of an AI-rooted journey for doing reductions, because it can’t go wrong, and it makes it easy for colleagues. When we listen to retailers talk about winning hearts and minds, there are lots of passionate people about donating food. How do we move that passion further upstream, to reduce the surplus and sell more? In some cases it’s just as important to sell that food to people cheaper, because some people are struggling for money.
Measurement, normalising surplus and champions
COLIN:
Many retailers have looked at store colleague donations, or donating to members of the public after a certain time. For the majority, colleagues being able to get the unsold food before it runs out could be quite a motivating factor, and again help close that gap between what they do at home and what they see in the store. It must hurt a lot, if you’re a food waste fanatic, to see stuff being thrown in the dumpster.
RICHARD:
Most of our discussions on food waste always come back to KPIs and measurement, because what gets measured gets done. You mentioned that markdowns sometimes get missed. In some retailers they have a KPI against that, and you can pick it up quickly. But that’s not true winning hearts and minds, it’s a process and being measured. There’s also a risk with high-performing waste systems, where people on charity redistribution start normalising surplus, saying it’s okay because charities will take it. I know first-hand that probably only around 30% of the surplus generated can actually get to a charity. So we’re never going to run out of surplus to donate, because there will always be some to ensure availability, and availability is what everyday consumers want, otherwise they go somewhere else.
COLIN:
We often talk about food waste as a financial number rather than a number of meals. We’ve seen retailers run up the flagpole, “this store has donated this many meals,” then try to beat that number year on year. To your point, that’s probably the wrong avenue to go down.
RICHARD:
Further upstream, what you’re really trying to do is reduce food waste, and you can almost only make that reduction once. It’s a bit like trying to achieve a 50% food waste reduction by 2030. What happens after 2030? So we’ve got to unearth a narrative that’s still relevant after you’ve done such a great job, because nobody’s going to stop thinking about retailers wasting food.
COLIN:
We did hear good examples from retailers about creating champions of food waste, people almost acting as the guardians of the environment in the stores. Have you seen value in that approach?
RICHARD:
We’ve gone round in circles with that over the years, and they always work for a while. Unfortunately it then becomes a bit like wallpaper, where people aren’t paying attention anymore, so the role stops existing. You can have that role, but you’ve got to keep reinventing it every three to six months, because if you keep talking about the same thing, people switch off.
COLIN:
Food waste breaks down into two problems: surplus food, which is upstream, and unsold food. What we’re looking at is how, of all the surplus, we make sure most of it goes down the pyramid. If we’ve gone past the prevent stage, how do we get it to humans, or sell it to humans? And that goes back to your point about markdowns. Well, let’s solve that one then.
RICHARD:
A bit of work to do, but yes. It was an interesting conversation.
COLIN:
Lots of work to do there. Thank you so much for your time, and we’ll see you next time.
