Food waste management for the UK grocery retail sector—a supply chain collaboration perspective

Abstract

Food waste is a consequence of the contemporary retail environment, where maintaining high product availability and customer choice is considered the basis of competition. It has become an especially focal issue in recent years for grocery retailers. Despite the evidence of retailers adopting many good practices to mitigate food waste, there are still many challenges facing the sector. This paper thus conducted a qualitative study drawing on secondary data on the big four UK supermarkets and twelve in-depth interviews with high-level supply chain (SC) managers in one of those four supermarkets to investigate UK retailers’ waste management practices and develop SC collaboration strategies for preventative waste management. The findings show that SC collaboration on the waste management needs to focus on forecasting, product range management, case size changes, performance measurement, information systems, and multi-stakeholder collaboration. This study recommends that retailers enhance their institutional collaboration with SC partners and social collaboration with other stakeholders.