Food Waste in Grocery Stores: How to Measure It and Cut It

Food waste looks small on a grocer's sales line and large on its profit line. A chilled product binned at closing loses its whole cost, not a margin, and on fresh counters that happens every day. The useful question for a chain is not the national total but where in its own stores the waste comes from, and which part of it a better order, an earlier date check or a timely reduction would have saved.

1. How much a grocery store throws away

Retail is a small part of the total. Across the EU in 2024, shops and other food distribution produced 8% of all food waste, about 10 kg per person a year; households produced most of the rest¹. In the UK, WRAP's latest estimate puts retail waste at 234,000 tonnes, worth £0.74bn². In the US, unsold food in retail was worth $26.9bn in 2024, equal to 3% of food and beverage retail sales³.

Smaller grocers feel it most. US independents reported total store shrink, which includes theft as well as waste, at 3.9% of sales, against a gross margin of 27.9%⁴. The pressure is also regulatory: EU countries must cut food waste per person in retail and consumption together by 30% by the end of 2030, against the 2021 to 2023 average⁵. Even large grocers find it hard. Tesco set out to halve the food waste of its own operations by December 2025 and reached a 24% cut⁶.

2. Measure it per store, per category, at cost

Published waste rates are hard to compare because each one counts something different. Large grocers report tonnes, against the total food they handled, and leave out what was redistributed or turned into animal feed. Read side by side, the headline figures look close, but they are not the same measure^{2, 6, 7, 8}:

A store chain needs a measure it can act on, and that is money, not tonnes. Record every write-off at cost, with a reason (out of date, damaged, quality), against the store, the category and the day. Then express it as a share of the same category's sales in the same store. Keep the loss on reduced-to-clear items as its own line: a chicken sold at half price is a margin cost, a chicken in the bin is a cost of goods, and the two call for different fixes.

3. Reduce to clear or bin it

The large UK grocers put the reduction first. At Tesco, surplus food is first offered to customers through its yellow sticker reductions, and the company says it uses AI to optimise store orders and reduction levels⁶. Sainsbury's reports trialling technology that optimises markdowns on near-dated products⁷.

The case for it is simple arithmetic. Food reaching its date tonight has already cost what it cost; any price above zero recovers some of that, and the bin recovers nothing. Researchers at Wageningen modelled a product sold at a discount over its last two days of shelf life against one never discounted⁹:

Two limits apply. Customers learn when the stickers go on, and a reduction that pulls shoppers away from full-price stock costs more than the waste it saves. And a product that needs a reduction every evening is not a markdown problem: the order is too large, and that is where to fix it.

For longer-life lines the same choice comes months earlier. On 1 November 2026, marql read Pralio, a chocolate and nut store in Brașov, as holding far more stock than it sells. Among the options it listed: stop reordering, buy no faster than the trays sell, move the stock to a store where it sells, and a 30 to 50% markdown on what is two to three months from its best-before date. The dates themselves are checked on the shelf; marql reads the stock and the sales. The Yammy Way and Pralio success story has the full reading.

4. Which fresh categories waste most

The Dutch supermarket monitor reports losses for each category as a share of what was bought. Most of the shelf wastes very little; a few chilled and baked categories waste many times more⁸:

Rates and volumes rank differently. In the US, produce is the largest single source of unsold food in retail at 33.1%, ahead of fresh meat and seafood at 13.6% and dairy and eggs at 11%¹⁰. So read both: the rate tells you which category is ordered or handled badly, the volume tells you where the money is.

5. Compare your stores with each other

The Dutch monitor is published as a benchmark each supermarket can hold its own figures against⁸. For a chain, the more useful benchmark is its own stores. Two stores of the same format, selling the same bread, should waste a similar share of it. If one bins twice the chain's rate, the cause is local: an order sized for last month, a bake plan that ignores the afternoon, a counter that shows only the newest stock.

Compare like with like, as you would for like-for-like sales: the same category, the same weekdays, the same weeks of the year. And look at waste and availability together. A store that cuts its bakery waste by running out at four o'clock has moved the cost from the bin to lost sales, which the out-of-stocks guide shows how to find.

6. What cuts it

In US retail, most unsold food was pulled because of its date, not because it had spoiled¹⁰:

That puts most of the fix before the bin. Order fresh lines by the day and by the store, from each store's own sales for that weekday, so less reaches its date unsold; the reorder point guide covers the method, and the censored demand guide explains why a day that sold out understates what the store could have sold. Check dates every morning and put the oldest stock in front. Reduce early enough that the reduction sells, then redistribute what is still good to eat.

It works over time. Dutch supermarkets cut their food losses by 28.0% between 2018 and 2025⁸.

7. Limitations

The published rates measure weight, and each uses its own definition. The UK retail estimate is for 2021, the latest WRAP has published. The category rates come from Dutch supermarkets and may differ in other countries and formats. The discount result is a simulation, and the US independents' shrink figure includes theft.

How marql reads waste

marql reads sales and stock for every product in every store from the EPOS or ERP a chain already uses, read-only, and waste wherever the till system records it, so each store's write-offs sit next to what the same category sold. It does not track expiry dates or batches: fresh lines are read by their sales and stock. Nico, the AI Fresh Manager that proposes tomorrow's fresh order and when to mark down, is being built with grocery chains in a pilot this winter; the grocery page describes it.