So I went to the supermarket the other night to pick up some milk. There were several half-gallon jugs who were set to expire in two days, and several which weren’t due to expire until a week later. Naturally, I picked up the latter.
But that gets me thinking – what happens to the expiring-soon jugs that are still on the shelf after their expiration date? I can’t imagine the market still selling them, or giving them to someone else. Do they just dump it down the drain (which would be a horrible waste)? Or do they give it back to the dairy and let them recycle it to make processed cheese? Or what?
The supermarket in which I work does in fact dump it down the drain. To prevent an excess of waste, if we have milk in the cooler with a 10-day date and milk with a 5-day date, we fill the case with the 5-day milk until it sells down pretty well. The ordering of milk is very difficult to balance correctly because it spoils so (relatively) quickly. If we order too much, we throw it all out; if we don’t order enough, we disappoint our customers.
In fact, there have been a number of cases of chain supermarkets shipping expired milk to their inner city outlets. (It was never a widespread practice and I have not heard of anyone being nabbed for this in over 15 years, but it certainly did happen.)
If you google (I guess I’ll just do it) Safeway
had a bad shipment of milk in '96. Corporate let all the stores know to get rid of the milk, so they did… right down storm drains.
It wasn’t long after that that we (Safeway - I know longer work there) were given standards as to how much we could dump down a drain in any one 24 hr. period. If I recall it was somewhere around 10 gallons of liquid.
We would do the same thing as bambi, keeping the close dated stuff in front and trying to sell it down. We also guarunteed that the milk would be good for 5 days after the sell by date, though we wouldn’t sell it after the sell by date.
You’d probably be suprised how much food a grocery store has to throw away. Sometimes hundreds of loafs of bread, or cases and cases of canned food…
… and this is why people go dumpster diving. Some friends and I found about four shopping carts full of bread products behind a supermarket on New Year’s Eve, just sitting next to the dumpster and awaiting trash pickup. We stuffed as much as we could into a car that already had five occupants and a full trunk and gorged on slightly-stale baked goods for a couple of days. Ooh, so much wheat… We heartily bemoaned the lack of a Food Not Bombs in town. So much stuff that went to waste!
Most of our out-dated or close-dated bread and pastries goes to a local food bank. Our vendor-delivered products are the exception – they go back to the vendor so they can sell them in the discount bakery stores. Everything else that goes out of date (cheese, meat, eggs, boxed dinners, pasta, etc. Almost everything, eventually) gets shipped back to corporate and eventually back to the manufacturer. Some of what is sent back can be donated, some must be thrown away. That’s part of the reason for the grocery industry’s 1% - 3% net profit margin.
As to elfbabe’s comment: Because of liability issues surrounding dumpster diving, all of our trash goes into a compactor whose bin is locked and picked up weekly by the trash service. Honestly, everything that’s still legal and safe to sell is sold and everything that’s possible to donate is donated, so I don’t feel too bad about what is thrown away.
I wish more grocery stores were like that. I accept that some food is going to be wasted, no matter what is done - it’s places that don’t even seem to make an effort that bother me.
whatami has a good point – I’d never really thought about all the other spoiled foodstuffs that gets thrown away before. I guess I started thinking about milk because its shelf life is so relatively short.
Pity there isn’t a way we can recycle this stuff to make edible food for the poor and homeless… is there?
Most large chains (Fred Meyers, Albertsons, Safeway) here in the NW do that. If you donate the bread up to the Sell by Date you get some sort of tax break. The problem though is distributing this stuff. The groups that pick it up don’t typically have large trucks to come pick stuff up. You give what you can and throw the other perishable stuff away.
Bambi is once again correct that most non-perishable items get returned to corporate, who works with the supplier on getting rid of it.