International day of awareness of food loss and waste

A change in google searches

When you work in marketing, like I do, you keep a close eye on how people find our website. What are they googling? Recently I’ve noticed a change. Last month I started seeing that a lot of people that find us are searching for things like “waste food collection near me” and “excess food collection near me”. This is something new. This is anecdotal evidence of course, but it got me googling to see if someone else picked up on this hunch. Nothing, and since I’m not an investigative journalist I let it go until it was time to write this blogpost. Googled again. This time I found an article in the Grocery Gazette that confirmed that my hunch was right. According to the article those  searches har gone up with 39% all over Britain. I think it’s safe to say that this is true in many more countries as well. This year we also deal with several global concerns such as war, climate change, inflation and a world still disrupted by the pandemic. In these times it should be common sense to take care of all the precious supplies we have.

Luckily there are a lot of people, companies and countries that try to change this. I’ve highlighted some for you:

👉 British chain, Sainsbury’s just opened up a pop up freezer store called ‘Sainsfreeze’ to spread awareness how to store food smarter and avoid food waste by freezing food properly. The food is given away to the public for free. Very cool! Read more about it!

👉 Swedish Coop has started working with a new waste fridge, with the message, “Shop good, make good”. The goal is to make bumped and bruised fruits and goods about to expire more accessible and attractive for the customers. Read about it (in swedish)!

👉Lastly, here is a report from McKinsey & Company about how grocery retailers can reduce food loss. Read about it here!