Tesco CEO Dave Lewis is chairing a global food waste campaign at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and has won praise from influential anti-food-waste activists for taking genuine steps to help remedy the worldwide problem, TheGuardian.com reports.
The event, which examines what actions can be taken by food retailers, growers and producers, and people working in agrifood supply chains, is fronted by a band of 30 leaders from multinational corporations, UN bodies, NGOs, and national governments. The campaign's overarching objective is to halve food waste by 2030.
Prominent food-waste campaigner Tristram Stuart, said the initiative shown by Dave Lewis and Tesco is "the kind of responsibility we want all retailers to take, to look into their supply chains, see how their policies are causing their suppliers to waste food and take responsibility for it."
Specifically, he referred to a Tesco decision to sell Kenyan beans that have not been chopped in a way that allows them to fit neatly into the retailer’s plastic packaging. The move is worth €70,000 of supplementary income per year for the producer in question.
Speaking of the supply chain problems in the African nation more broadly, Stuart said, “They [Kenyan farmers] get a cancellation order. They have to destroy their crops. Day labourers don’t get paid and literally they can’t put food on the plates of their children. And that is happening in our supply chains. We are paying for that. We are using Kenyan land and Kenyan water, in a country where there are millions of hungry people and where agriculture competes for habitat with elephants and lions … To then waste 50 per cent of what those farmers produce, we can all agree, is obscene.”
© 2016 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Peter Donnelly. To subscribe to ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine, click here.
