[ReinholdNiebuhr]

Increase investment into labor costs. Hire people who actually know a thing or two about cooking (that would mean hiring people with culinary training, not just people who perform well in the interview process.) You can convert pretty much all that's going to waste into sellable products on the store shelves. You might have to sacrifice consistency over time in that, your stock or broths made in house will differ per what's available.. but that could be sold as "authentic in house made". Same goes with soups, stews, pies etc.

I worked for a Safeway for a bit and would see how many bananas they'd trash of which you could easily make a few things on mass in house.. banana cream pie, banana ice cream... if regulations were to be cut back some you could even make banana rum in store. I don't think that'll happen anytime soon.

It's also a shame there isn't a system set up where you freeze the wasted product in bulk and ship it out to a facility that could process it into animal feed.

[pbhjpbhj]

In our local Tesco, in a relatively poor UK city, the saving on "last day" food is about 10-20%, it used to be much higher. Presumably they're more wary of self-cannabilising. Except bread products after 8pm, it's almost never worth buying the reduced items now. I imagine they have much more waste. Mind you most ready food retailers, like Greggs (high-street bakery) don't do reductions preferring to dump unsold food rather than let people get them cheaply.

Refuse bin areas getting covers and locks is some sort of r/latestagecapitalism indicator.

[Moter8]

In Germany it's common that food that doesn't look like it's still worth the full price gets discounted. My department works on the discount label printing and I've visited a store to test it out.

In the mornings an employee looks through the fruits and vegetables, trashes spoiled stuff, but also picks away some and discounts them for 30-50% or so, depending on how good it still is.

It is usually gone in 20 minutes, some seemingly poor people got cheap food thanks to this.

[robryan]

Economics behind it mean throwing them out is the most cost effective thing they can do. It would probably require something like a government penalty or incentive around food waste to change.

[ReinholdNiebuhr]

Incentives are certainly skewed currently with write offs for losses etc not necessarily encouraging prevention of food waste.

For the in store products, I think automation could eventually be the key but obviously we're sometime away from a full automated kitchen. Once that happens we should be able to savage a good bit. Thinking more about stuff that wouldn't be savageable .. freezing might not be the best option as you'd be required to keep it frozen during shipment. So investing in dehydration or freeze drying would be key,... dehydration probably is cheaper over freeze drying.

Changing the write off rules would be useful. Not taxing products made in store would be a possible incentive temporarily at least. If we were able to save a lot of stuff from going into the trash and instead going into feed.. maybe we could get cheaper animal products..but I sense that's probably more complicated than it seems.

Idk.. just ideas.