Tesco today revealed plans to “revolutionise” how the industry approaches food waste, after appointing engineering company RenEco to build a major new facility to turn its surplus food into animal feed.
The radical move, exclusively revealed to The Grocer, comes after Tesco’s revelation last year that tens of thousands of tonnes of surplus food previously declared as used for animal feed had in fact been sent to more environmentally damaging anaerobic digestion plants by its former waste partner.
Tesco said its new partnership had created a brand-new site in Northamptonshire which would allow it to unpack surplus food products and transform them into pulp or crumb used to feed animals.
The focus of the operation will be on bakery and fresh produce, while an additional, separate process will see meat and fish surplus also used in household petfood.
Tesco said the new site had the capacity to process 1,000 tonnes of surplus food every week and could help revolutionise how the food industry approaches waste.
Deliveries to the facility will be made every week from early November, with around 40% of the site capacity to be utilised with Tesco surplus.
It said it meant the new operation had the capacity to take food surplus from other retailers and manufacturers to help grow the potential to reduce food waste through animal feed.
Tesco stressed it believed no good food should go to waste and any food that can be eaten by humans should go to humans.
The move comes after a major blow to the retailer’s food waste fight in January last year when it announced it had terminated relations with its “animal food partner” RSR (Resource Secure Recovery), also trading as Resource Food & Resource Innovations Group, following an internal review which showed that food it believed was being processed for animal feed was going to anaerobic digestion.
Tesco was forced to withdraw all previously published waste performance data for the UK and the wider group.
It meant that rather than the previously reported 45% reduction for the 2022/23 year against a 2016/17 baseline of 95,127 tonnes of food wasted, the figure slumped to just 18%, forcing the retailer to rebuild its system towards its target of a 50% reduction.
Claire Lorains, group quality and sustainability director at Tesco, said the supermarket was now hoping other retailers would join it in the response to last year’s crisis.
“Food waste is a global issue, so we’re continually looking for ways that we can reduce this across our own business, and support others to do so across the wider industry too,” she told The Grocer.
“Working together with RenEco means that we are able to create a viable solution to reducing food waste, and we would urge other businesses to utilise the new facility for their own operations too. Together, we can make a real difference in tackling food waste.”
William Wykes, director at RenEco, added: “Identifying opportunities to extract value from food surplus and support circular economies are helping us accelerate the move away from fossil-derived resources. We are excited to be constructing a new site to process food surplus to be redistributed to feed animals, offsetting the requirement for traditional feed ingredients which are more carbon-intensive to produce.
“We are determined that our ongoing collaboration with Tesco will bring future learnings, developments and opportunities to generate additional products from food surplus generated from across the entire food supply chain.”
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