Surely there has to be a better way?

In our Tesco's FC, the grapes are already perishing by the time they reach the shelves, so I'm surprised they are stating only 25% of wastage!

I don't think it's down to growing less food but the Stock Managers in the shops, they just don't seem to be able to work out supply and demand properly, I've noticed that with many items in the shop here not only fruit and veg. Supply that is lacking in some areas and over the top in others where it isn't needed. A good example of this is pre-packaged bread.

 

It's the same with the bags of salad leaves and spinach.....you open a bag of it and it's already slimey!

 

Here's an even more radical idea. Why don't we turn our backs on the supermarkets? After all, its not the little independent greengrocers and butchers that's chucking out huge volumes of perfectly good stuff. They can't afford to. At our local greengrocers, stuff is graded as class 1 or class 2. Class 1 is what you'd see in the supermarkets. Class 2 is perfectly fine but the supermarkets would reject it because its not artificial enough, and it is dirt cheap. Like a box of tomatoes for 30p for example. And, just for good measure, you get to know the shop staff and actually enjoy a bit of light banter when you go in. Can't do that with a checkout girl who's been ordered to process the queue as fast as possible, or worse, the electronic self service checkouts from hell.

It would be win-win for everyone except the huge corporations. Small independents would do ok. People would eat better and cheaper. Farmers/producers would get a fairer deal, and we wouldn't have to see so many Z list celebrities so much on telly peddling deep fried frozen filth.

Wont happen though. Its just too easy to use the supermarkets. I occasionally still use them myself for stuff that is hard to get from the independents, but most of our stuff now comes from the little shops and I would never go back to a lifestyle of weekly trip to the one big supermarket of choice to buy a load of plastic packaging.

My point is, we can criticise the supermarkets as much as we like, but its us as consumers that control things. If the masses all decided that the supermarket culture is all wrong, supermarkets would have to change or go bust.

 

Apples????? 40%????? But they are an easy- to-keep fruit that lasts all winter if properly stored. Somebody, somewhere needs a bit of re-education.

I used to work with a girl who brought an apple a day to work and kept them in the fridge. If she hadn't eaten them by Friday she binned them - didn't fancy them after being in the fridge for a few days. I felt an enforced spell on a refrigerated container ship from New Zealand to the UK would have been enlightening for her.

Another girl I worked with didn't fancy stuff that looked like it had been grown in a field. Sniff, sniff, ick.

It would have been funny except these people were supposedly reasonably well-educated.

 

Not that I would wish to defend the big supermarkets but if they run out of strawberries in Wimbledon or brussels on Christmas Eve the public will complain mercilessly, so conditioned are we to expect instant gratification and total convenience where food is concerned. So, given our unpredictable weather patterns I think it's inevitable that there'll be wastage as supermarkets over-estimate to be on the safe side.

I've got no sympathy for consumers who are stupid enough to throw away good, edible food.

Fern4, I think bagged salad is notorious for getting thrown out, especially as it's often 2 for 1 in supermarkets and customers buy too much. When I'm Prime Minister it will be banned.

 

For me it's not a case of convenience shopping Clueless. We only have one greengrocer on the island and that's fifteen miles away. I have a local butcher which I'm not keen on, shall we say the appearance of the shop is not appealing. So really I have no choice but to shop in a supermarket, it would cost a fortune in petrol to drive all over the island for my goods.

 

I think the problem is not with the supermarket as such, it is with the consumer.
Supermarkets only do what the majority want, and they want this kind of stuff. Must agree on grapes, most I see have been picked about a month before we get them.

As to apples, the supermarkets buy large amounts from cold store, they dont have facilities for keeping them.
Salad stuff is wrapped in plastic, so rots very quickly.
As to so called, store baked bread, what a con that is.
Its awful stuff, either under cooked or overcooked, by "trained bakers", from dough that is brought in, probably made miles away in a factory.

 

Sadly that's an increasingly common scenario. It seems in some places the damage is already done. It has the potential to happen here too. In recent years we've seen the arrival of two large supermarkets in the town centre (Morrisons and Tesco), and several more even larger ones just out of town, including a massive new Asda that has resulted in yet another farm being lost to concrete and tarmac.

I think its sad, and I think those of us that can, have a duty to try to look after the independents. We rant and rave about the demise of nature these days, then get in the car and drive to the supermarket to buy some plastic and a bit of chemical packed fruit and veg, give £Billions to private investors, don't even flinch at the idea that some of the fruit we're looking at doesn't even grow at this time of year yet there it is, fresh from the other side of the world. Some poor farmer in a skint country probably worked really hard to earn a few pittance for his produce, it gets shipped to the other side of the planet, just to go in the bin.

Another thought. Imagine the looks you'd get in Morrisons or Asda if you found a staff member, pointed a chunk of meat or a veg you've never used before and asked 'what's the best way to prepare this then?'. I'd be willing to bet as much as fiver that you wouldn't end up in a 10 minute conversation about it.

 

A couple of years ago I spoke to the Manager of the in-store bakery at our local shop about the above because I'd realised the under cooked bread was giving me stomach cramps, I haven't bought it since! He said the reason that the bread 'looks' under or overcooked is because the ovens have a pre-set temperature on production, in other words the bakers can't change the temperature. If this is the case then the bread IS under or over cooked and doesn't just 'look' it! On the other hand no baker would use the same temperature for everything that goes in those ovens, bread, cakes etc.

Do these people think all their customers are stupid!

 

Clueless, even though I'm held pretty much captive by this supermarket, I do buy British there whenever possible.

 

Said on the news last night that 40% of their bakery goods got chucked. Well, how about donating it to a homeless charity (I know you can't do it with more perishable goods but surely the bread's good for more than a day) or else don't bake/buy as much

 

The food chain is very hard to manage, there are lots of differant signed contracts between shop and middleman and then the farmer,

Take milk, most farmers have a contract with a middleman not the shop (but there are now some contracts with shops but still goes through the middleman) the middleman does all the selling, packing, cleaning, transporting etc Have you notice that the farmers are not having a go at the supermarkets now but are having a goo at the middlemen for more money, as i sayed the contracts are with the middlemen not the shops

Bread used to be sold on, sell or return in the shops, the bakey can over produce the day before then the shop dosen't sell some and then there alot to get rid of, some bread gets relabled and the rest go for animal feed,

 

Some produce don't even make the shef
Haul a load of dog food(28tons) from the maker to supermarket werehouse, the return load was a load of damage dog food(25tons) back to the maker, most of the pallets had a few damage tins on the bottom, when i got back to the maker they said you have to take it to another palace some else will also come with me. the palace was land fill and we had to hand ball it all off and had to be cover over before we left, i said to the helping hand it's a waste, he's reply was it's cheaper than sorting out the damage one's and if they give it away to people then they would lose the sale in the shops