This Walmart Worker Threw Away Food On The Job, Then Went Home Hungry | HuffPost Impact?
We all know that Walmart’s goal is to make money. So why don’t they sell the “misshapen but perfectly good” produce to a processor instead of throwing it away? Fruit doesn’t have to look pretty to make good juice, or pie filling. The veggies could be used for condiments, or frozen dinners, or chopped up and canned.
They should not let this much food go to waste.
The most likely answer is that they won’t make money at it.
Because it’s not economically feasible. There are issues of scale (worthwhile quantities), particular varieties, transportation, etc. If it were easy and profitable, it would have been done.
At the very least you could use it to feed hogs. I worked at a place that through away 50,000# of buttermilk pancake mix because the outside of the drums had traces of mouse urine.
Because Walmart is a retail department store/supermarket and not a wholesale fruit & vegetable products producer. There is little to no overlap between the two.
A ‘bigger picture’ answer is also that, like it or not, we live in the first world and first world residents do not & will not eat gross looking food (regardless if it tastes exactly the same or not).
Every American harbors a certain shame that our great constitutional republic needed to be repaired with tweaks like universal suffrage, abolition of slavery, women’s rights, social security, etc. Don’ think for a minute that it’s now all fixed. There are still plenty of things going on that future generations will look back on with a sense of “How could we have thought that was OK?”
They could label the produce as “heirloom” and sell it out in no time.
If you’ve got a steady “trickle” of imperfect produce that can’t be sold at retail, it costs more money to get it to the hog farm (in an edible state) than to the compost heap. How much more, you say? I’ll bet the increment is more, on a per-calorie basis, than the price of the standard hog feed that the farmer usually buys - which would explain why he ain’t buying Walmart’s imperfect produce.
Your employer’s 25 tons of pancake mix was probably too much of a pain in the ass to sell because it’s a one-time thing; it would have to be stored somewhere () while an employee spent time () searching for a one-time buyer (“yo, I got 25 tons of piss-encrusted pancake mix, you interested?”) and then negotiating/executing the deal, and taking on whatever risk there might be if the media finds out they sold a bunch of piss-encrusted pancake mix instead of discarding it. For the price they would get, it’s just not worth it.
It’s truly unfortunate that Walmart’s reject produce can’t be given to its minimum-wage store employees as a perk of sorts, but the reality is that doing so would create a perverse incentive: employees would be motivated to intentionally damage produce so as to divert it to the imperfect-produce stream. I encountered this as a min-wage employee at several fast-food restaurants: food that had gone past its allowable time limit was discarded, never given to employees. Same with leftover food when the restaurant locked its doors at the end of the day; to do otherwise would motivate employees to “accidentally” prepare excessive amounts of food in the hopes of scoring a free cheeseburger at the end of their shift.
Egad, it’s a teratomato…
The point I was trying to make is that if the food is “gross looking” but still good to eat, it could be made into something else where you don’t see it. A misshapen orange could be turned into juice, a bruised apple could become pie filling, etc.
And individual consumers producing their own food would do just that. Growing up, we ate all kinds of bruised fruits and misshapen vegetables. But as a consumer, when I go to the grocery store and pay money, I look for the most pristine produce I can find, and so do you, for the same reason you’ll buy a cosmetically perfect automobile rather than one with a scratch or small dent in it. Produce and grains that are ‘seconds’–rejectable for aesthetic conditions–is already used in processed foods. (Believe me, you do not want to know where ‘vegetable’ oil comes from.)
The notion of taking damaged or misshapen produce and reallocating it to other uses, like feeding hogs, is logistically impractical, especially for a high volume, low margin business like Wal-Mart, which seeks to maximize labor efficiency so they can put your local supermarket out of business and hire the unemployed workers for minimum wage. And no commercial hog farm feeds their animals on ‘table scraps’; they get a scientifically determined feed product to maximize growth, nor would that be an efficient use of food that is otherwise suitable for human consumption.
There is a much larger problem here than just food wastage; it is the fact that a major corporation with thousands of stores and a revenue comparable to a middling European nation can’t (won’t) pay its employees a sufficient wage to buy fresh, healthy food. Giving them the scraps of what other people decline to eat is far from addressing that inequality.
Stranger
boffking I know it’s probably difficult for you to hear this, but you are not the first person to come up with most of your mundane questions or assertions. Try googling “wasted grocery produce” or “dismantle hydropower dams”. You may be surprised at all the links you get that discuss the very issue you are raising.
Sure, it could.
How much would it cost to pack up the small lots of surplus produce from each store, ship it to the processing plant, unload it, throw out the stuff that is now too gross to process, and turn what’s left into canned slurry?
This is the equivalent of driving an hour to get to the gas station across the state line where gas is $0.10 a gallon cheaper. Fill up your tank and save $1.60 each time!
The problem here is not understanding the economics of food production. We aren’t suffering from a shortage of calories. The cost of the raw ingredients is a small fraction of the costs of Generic Canned Food Slurry Inc.
Let’s take for instance oranges for juice. Can Walmart provide unsold oranges to a juice bottling factory cheaper than an orange plantation can? Or can the juice factory buy oranges from the plantation more cheaply?
The fact is that it would cost a lot more money to ship the surplus wasted food from all the grocery stores in America to some processing plant than it would to just buy new raw ingredients from the farms. Supply chains are a lot simpler. Transportation is simpler. Quality control is simpler. All that means cheaper.
Wasted food dumped in the trash is less wasteful than spending a lot effort trying to find a use for the wasted food. At my local grocery store they take the surplus produce and dump it in bins, and some of the local hobby farmers collect it as pig food. That only works because we’re a rural community where there are local hobby farmers who are willing to come and pick up the stuff that would otherwise be thrown away.
There’s no way this stuff could make it back into the human food supply. The way to handle this is to never let the misshapen orange get on the grocery store shelves in the first place. You hardly ever see ugly produce at the grocery store because it almost always goes to the Slurry Factory in the first place.
If it costs you $10 to save $1, you’ve wasted $9. Sometimes wasting food is a lot less wasteful than saving it.
There are folks trying to do something about this. Many grocery stores do donate products to local food banks. There are also volunteer organizations that glean foods from fields and orchards for food banks and soup kitchens.
An organization called Hungry Harvest collects imperfect produce that grocery stores reject and delivers it by the box to subscribers, starting at $15/box. They’re in Baltimore, D.C. and Philadelphia areas currently. Kind of like a CSA for unloved veggies.
I haven’t signed up yet, but we’re going to give it a shot.
In theory but the reality is that a hog operation big enough to use something like that will need a reliable supply and it just doesn’t become hog feed by simple movement. There is a Dirty Jobs segment out there on some of the factors/process involved.
it’s only a start, but there are some charities out there who will pick up still-good-but-unsalable food from grocery stores and restaurants and distribute it to “soup kitchens” and domestic violence shelters. Forgotten Harvest is one such organization which operates in the Metro Detroit area.
which reminds me, I need to renew my donation to them.
Why don’t you take this on as your next great idea and make it work? If you think someone is missing out on a great business opportunity, but are unwilling to do it yourself, then you’re almost certainly wrong in thinking what a great business opportunity it is.
So, put a business plan together where you offer to buy all this food from Walmart, set up a distribution network, and… PROFIT!!!
What makes you think that’s not exactly what the fruit/veg producers do?
The issue comes in where there is a tiny percentage of fruit/veg that is “ugly” and unsaleable in a retail store. If there’s a quantity of ugly/damaged fruit/veg large enough to be economical to juice/jam/pie filling/distill into brandy, etc… you can bet your bottom dollar that they already use them for those purposes. If you watch those “How It’s Made” and “Food Factory” shows, they do this all the time with outsized and ugly stuff.
Instead, your average Wal-Mart maybe has a piece or maybe two per box that’s mangled or otherwise beat up, or that somehow slipped through the QC process. They can’t sell mangled or beat up fruit, and once it’s at the retail store, it won’t keep long enough to actually send anywhere else and do anything with, so they throw it away.
Unsold fruit/veg often has the same issues- it’s probably dried out, mushy, is turning brown, is going limp, etc… so they throw it out too.
It’s not like they continually have huge overages on that kind of thing; in such a low margin business as grocery stores, they likely consider any significant amount a failure in ordering and/or sales; I can’t imagine they plan to throw away much unsold produce at all, as it’s literally throwing money away, but some is unavoidable.
There’s just no economical way to get a handful of beat up/ugly fresh fruit, or any unsold, about-to-spoil fruit anywhere in any length of time to do anything useful with it.
Fareway, here in the Midwest, marks their about-to-go-over produce down, and their meat too. They also have a bin for dairy products at deep discount.
I buy a lot of discounted things from them this way. They’re also very good about wrapping up dented or crushed packages (flour, pasta, cans, etc.) and selling them in this manner.