Q&A: How Morrisons & Too Good To Go are Reducing Food Waste

Each year, roughly a third of all food is wasted. 

Throughout the supply chain of food, significant CO₂ emissions are generated and precious resources, like water, are used.

When food waste reaches landfill, it produces methane which is 25 times more potent than CO₂. 

Too Good To Go connects customers to retailers with unsold food, supporting the reduction of food waste across Europe and North America. 

The company says it has saved more than 350 million meals and is a certified B Corp.

Sophie Trueman is Country Director for Too Good to Go in the UK and Ireland, overseeing its operations. 

Morrisons is a grocery retailer with nearly 500 supermarkets across the UK.

Founded in 1899, it serves around 12 million customers per week. 

Andrew Edlin is Senior Sustainability Manager at Morrisons, responsible for delivering its sustainability programme across the business. 

Sophie and Andrew share their expertise with Sustainability Magazine.

How big of a challenge is food waste and what are its broader impacts? 

Sophie: Food waste has an enormous impact on our society, economy and the environment. According to the WWF, 40% of the food that we produce globally goes to waste and in the UK alone every year we throw away 10.7 million tonnes of food, worth £21.8bn (US$28.2bn). To put that UK figure into perspective, that’s roughly the same amount of food produced annually by 9,600km2 of farmland - half the size of Wales. 

But the challenge is more than just the volume of what we throw away. Shockingly, food waste is the cause of 10% of global CO₂e emissions, making it one of the biggest challenges we need to overcome in the fight against climate change. 

The impact of food waste affects everyone, which is why it’s so important that we all play our part in the solution.

Andrew: As one of the UK’s largest supermarket chains, it’s crucial that we recognise that the food systems that we rely on have some challenges. 

A central cause of this is climate change, to which food waste is a key contributor. As a business we must address this challenge so we can continue to make and provide food to customers that pass through our doors every week. This is why we’re working to halve our food waste by 2030 across our stores and redistribute more food to communities that need it which, given the cost-of-living crisis, is more important than ever.

When it comes to tackling food waste, what are the biggest hurdles and how can we overcome them? 

Sophie: Awareness was one of the biggest challenges we faced in setting up Too Good To Go. Businesses, consumers and even the Government were more focused on other contributors to climate change, like energy and aviation, despite food waste accounting for 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. 

If you look back 10 years, food waste wasn’t even part of the national conversation around climate change. Since then, we’ve been working closely with our partners to highlight the importance of managing food waste, while also getting on with tackling the challenge itself.

A lot of progress has been made, and we now have tens of thousands of businesses across the UK committed to reducing their food waste and driving awareness among their consumers. 

Andrew: There’s also an important educational aspect to taking on food waste. For example, 10% of the food wasted in Europe is due to consumers being confused by the difference between ‘Best Before’ and ‘Use By’ labels on food. This is one of the key reasons we removed ‘Use By’ labels from the milk we sell as it encourages consumers to trust their senses when deciding if the milk is good to drink.

This challenge is one of the reasons we became the first supermarket to partner with Too Good To Go back in November 2019. Instead of food being wasted as it hits its Best Before date, one of the processes we use is to pack it into Too Good To Go Surprise Bags for shoppers to buy from Morrisons stores across the UK. 

Sophie: We also support the move away from Use By labels where safe to do so. We have a Look-Smell-Taste label to help give guidance on Best Before-dated participating packs, which serves as a gentle reminder for consumers to trust their senses: if a Best Before-labelled food has been stored correctly, and looks, smells, and tastes okay, then it’s perfectly safe to consume. 

How important is collaboration and what are your approaches to partnerships? 

Sophie: Collaboration is vital. Very simply, we cannot solve food waste without bringing together businesses, government and consumers. We all have a part to play. 

At Too Good To Go we work with more than 40,000 partners in the UK alone. Recently we were thrilled to announce the expansion of our long-standing relationship with Morrisons to include their 930 Morrisons Daily Convenience stores. 

It’s collaborations and partnerships like these which have helped us to save over 40 million Surprise Bags in the UK, avoiding the equivalent CO₂e emissions of 18,770 flights around the world. 

Andrew: These types of partnerships are vital for the industry in terms of combating food waste. For us, we know our partnership with Too Good To Go saves our customers money while also helping us to play our part in reducing food waste and hitting our sustainability net zero target, so we are delighted to have recently rolled out Surprise Bags to some of our Morrisons Daily convenience stores.

What have been the key achievements of your partnership to date?

Sophie: Our partnership with Morrisons is nearing its five year anniversary, which shows just how strong this collaboration is.

In fact, Morrisons was the first supermarket to see our vision and partner with us back in 2019. 

Since then, this partnership has expanded to cover nearly 500 supermarkets across the UK, including Morrisons Market Kitchen and Cafés. Bolstered by the recent announcement that Morrisons Daily is joining the fight against food waste, we only see our partnership going from strength to strength in the future. 

Andrew: Customers and colleagues continue to tell us how much they value Too Good To Go’s Surprise Bags from Morrisons. This continued success and appreciation with both our internal and external stakeholders is very important to us and remains a key achievement of our partnership to date. 

Since we started working with Too Good To Go, we have saved nearly 2.3 million Surprise Bags of food from being wasted – a number we can only be proud of. The Morrisons Daily rollout trial alone also saw over 40,000 Surprise Bags saved from across the trial regions (north England, the Midlands and Wales), so we remain excited to see where the expansion of the partnership takes us.

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