The Pret A Manger (sorry, Flash site) sandwich chain in the UK makes a virtue of the fact that it donates all unsold sandwiches to the homeless at the end of each day.
I’ve done a lot of donated time at the Austin Food Back which does exactly the same thing as the Atlanta Food Bank. The Austin Food Bank also has huge refrigerated rooms and freezer rooms for fresh produce and bakery products. they’ve got a system for sorting and distributing all the different food they get donated. I’ve also volunteered at the Salvation Army where I’ve spent time in the kitchen making bag lunches for the homeless out of donated food as well.
I think one reason so many stores don’t donate food is that there may be no system to do so in their city. In Austin, the Food Bank makes it very convenient for business to donate.
At the bakery i worked at by 8pm we would take all the doughnuts and put them in bags and sell them for $2 a bag. If nobody bought them by 2am we threw them in the trash. there were no homeless in the area but i would’ve given them to people had they wanted them.
Grocery and food service operations often operate on razor thin margins. Lots of heavy supply chain reasearch went into the world of food distribution over the last century. It is far from unknown for grocery stores to turn over their inventory value 30-50 times a year. JIT and lean techniques keep the shelves stocked while minimizing waste, since waste not only does not generate revenue, it costs extra to dispose of. If you ever have the time to dig a bit the forecasting models and FIFO handling for a grocery store are fascinating and intimidating stuff.
I just work in a remanufacturing environment, perishables scare me. :eek:
We used to buy truckloads of expired bakery products for use as pig feed. It was a pain because we had to spend so much time unwrapping everything as we threw it into the pen. But I can tell you that pigs love twinkies.
I used to work at Cala (Ralphs/Kroger) and everything that expired was either composted or trashed. Non-meat product ( I assume) was sent to our meat facilities, but I don’t know for sure (and we changed meat companies several times. Everything else was trashed. We weren’t allowed to give away, take home, or seel cheap anything. (I mean, we did, of course, but it was a no-no.)
I work at a natural foods co-op and we rarely throw anything out. The employees get to take home about-to-turn produce and most outdated foodstuffs. It’s the coolest job perk ever. I don’t know what the legalities are if someone were to get sick, but I like that it gives the employees the agency to decide for themselves whether or not it would be a good idea to eat expired turkey sausages, or if maybe they should just be thrown away. Amazingly, we still get a steady clientelle of dumpster divers. God knows what they’re eating.
However, I worked at a Cracker Barrel and at the end of the night they’d throw out pans and pans of meatloaf, macaroni and cheese, and dumplings. It was awful. The least they could have done was let us eat some after close. It would never occur to me to make more food than necessary in the deli of my co-op, even though I get to take home outdated salads and sandwiches. I just do what my boss tells me to do. Because I get treated like an adult, I guess, and not like a liability like big corporate places tend to treat employees.
ZJ
My dad owned a small town grocery. I was a grown woman before I knew that cheese came without green spots. 
I don’t know abut other fast food restaurants, but I used to work at this Taco Bell where the manager was a raging asshead. On a busy night, the amount of wasted lettuce, cheese, taco shells, meat, tomatoes, etc. that would be thrown out from garbage bag under the prep area grill was staggering - we’re talking ten pounds or more, daily, of basically edible food. Not to mention orders set aside because someone messed up, like putting salsa on an order that wasn’t supposed to have any.
Anyhow, I was new to the job, and I was the one daily throwing out all this food. The manager made me pour bleach in the bag and shake it up like a salad, so that “Those homeless bums won’t be hanging around the store.” I did it, too – until one night when one of the so-called bums approached me with her two hungry kids wanting something to eat. I was so ashamed – I promised her to just come back the next night and I’d do her a lot better.
So I went through this great pretense of pouring bleach in the bag and taking it to the dumpster, only I’d hand it off to this woman and her kids. This went on for a couple of weeks. Then one day – my day off – the homeless mother asked the girl who worked my shift where I was with the food when she took the trash out, and she told the manager what I’d been doing, and the asshead fired me the second I walked in the door the next day.
Ah. I was ready to quit that job anyway.
I found out years later the asshead manager was fired by the corprate office a few months after I was, for embezzling.
Does anyone find it immeasurably depressing that our society has become such a litigious one, that feeding the hungry and homeless is a legal liability?
There just seems something so incredibly wrong about that.
One chain of grocery stores around here advertises that if you find something with an expiry date of today or tomorrow, it’s yours free.
Needless to say, this means that each store manager sends someone around every afternoon or evening to remove meat and dairy products that will expire the day after tomorrow :rolleyes:
All of this food - still safe to eat - was getting destroyed, until they got caught out and embarrassed on national television. Now, they put it in boxes in the cooler, and the Salvation Army sends volunteers around to pick it up and bring it to the distribution center.
Never underestimate the power of public embarrassment
Notice you were sold out immediately by the person who benefited from your generosity… can you just feel the mountains of gratitude… :rolleyes:
Good Lord, drachillix, at the risk of carting this thread off to GD or the Pit, do you really think this homeless family wanted to rat out their benefactor? They’re homeless and hungry, for God’s sake. And let’s remember who actually squealed - not the homeless family, but her co-worker - someone who no doubt felt the same way about that family as the manager.
I am not surprised that food that cannot be sold gets thrown away and/or rendered inedible. I remember seeing something similar on TV in the late 70s or early 80s - if memory serves, on “Real People” of all shows - of a couple who weren’t homeless but whho would dumpster dive for all the still edible but unsalable produce and baked goods and make meals for the homeless. They had evidence of grocery stores spraying their thrown away food with ammonia, and one scene had them being threatened with arrest for doing what they were doing.
“If we can’t make money off it, you won’t get fed”… and people wonder why I’m a Socialist.
sigh I do beg your pardon on this… I’ve got a belly full of Harpoon IPA. 
Usually bakeries would reduce the price (to half price) then throw it away if it still doesn’t get sold. Sometimes poor people manage to get their food though. e.g. a few years ago I spent some time with some poor people. Late at night they went to the back door of the bakery and there was a garbage bag full of baking that looked perfectly good… so we took what we wanted.
BTW, when I worked at McDonald’s in Australia, they’re supposed to throw burgers away if they’re more than 10 minutes old, and if it contains sliced tomato then they are supposed to throw it away after five minutes. If it is a slow night they might sell hour old burgers (on very rare occassions, if they’re being slack).
I know many supermarkets in my area that just throw out everything in the bakery that can’t be saved (doughnuts, pies, french loaves, cakes, cookies) and it just goes right in the dumpster.
It’s also the policy of Food Lion and Winn-Dixie (foodstore chains here in NC) to throw out EVERYTHING that’s past it’s expiration date. EVERYTHING.
Needless to say it’s not all wasted, me and my friends eat like kings sometimes
Old bakery products are fed to cattle where I’m from.
About a year ago, I was driving around my suburb with my buddies around 10:30 at night, and we went into the local grocery to get some containers of ice cream. One of my friends spotted 5 or 6 perfectly good sheetcakes being thrown into a garbage bag and asked for them; “It’s against code,” they said, but I don’t know if that’s technically true or not. So we come back out and he decides to go look in the dumpster–“It’s like searching for buried treasure”; cracks me up–because the cakes should be on top, after all. But it was padlocked. How disappointing :smack:
When I worked in a grocery store, which was about a total of 3 years, we pulled the unsold items to the back and got credit on it. Also worthy to note, I had a shiesty boss who would sometimes nail polish remover out before we opened up and remove the experation dates (especially on eggs) :rolleyes: As for bakery items, usually they were put on the top of the case or put out at a huge discount and would sell; if all of that failed they would just put them in the break room for the employees to snack on. Milk, we poured the milk down the drain and turned the empty containers back to the PF delivery guy for a credit. Fruits and veggies got chopped up and made into a salad or tray before they went totally bad. I know some of this sounds disgusting, but it’s the honest truth. As to how much un sold there is, it all depends on the store. I worked in one that moved roughly 2K - 3K units/week, and I worked in one that moved about 5 times that. The ironic part was there was a lot less unsold items in the larger store. believe me on this fact, small stores are going to the a thing of the past
At the supermarket I worked at the milk and juice were poured down the drain. The damages were returned for credit and the baked goods were thrown away. I don’t know what they did in other departments as I didn’t work in them.
They had a policy of allowing the employees to take home the damaged stuff and the day old stuff but people abused it. The stockers would damage extra things.
For a while we would give the baked goods to a local soup kitchen. They got picky about what they were getting (It wasn’t consistent enough for them in either volume or variety) and sometimes they never came for their stuff so we stopped.
We were supposed to go out around 3pm and pick all the bakery stuff that was expiring the next day and mark it down. They never gave us enough hours though and this was usually low priority. We did have people who would rifle the shelves and bring stuff to us to markdown.
Always check dates on everything you buy! I got a ‘promotion’ and took over the HBC aisle. The first thing I needed to do was inventory. While doing so I happened to notice a couple of items that were past date. These were medicines like aspirin and various decongestants. I started looking more carefully. I found more. By the time I was done I presented my boss with a 3 foot square box of expired medicines. Some of these items were 4 years past their dates. Inventory was much easier with empty shelves but writing up all those returns sucked.