In this episode of the Food Is Wasted podcast, I’ll be speaking to Christina O’Sullivan from Feedback – a London-based organisation running several campaigns related to food waste – such as the Gleaning Network and the Pig Idea – both of which feature on the Food Is Wasted website.

Feedback recently published a report called ‘The Food Waste Scorecard’, authored by Christina, which ranked the 10 biggest supermarkets in the UK according to their performance in reducing food waste.

The supermarkets were ranked using available data against the food use hierarchy, which requires that prevention be the priority towards tackling waste. You can see visual of the hierarchy in the show notes,

Tesco came out top of the rankings, having adopted measures including the publishing of third party audited food waste data – the first supermarket to do so. Signing up to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal 12.3, of halving food waste from farm to fork by 2030 – again the first supermarket to do so. As well as being, committed to extending transparency to include measurement of food waste in its supply chain.

At the bottom of the rankings was Waitrose, which has done very little in terms of transparency and action. Hopefully the publication of this report, and the publicity it’s getting, will motivate them to act more responsibly.

There’s a huge room for improvement from all supermarkets, and really there needs to be policy written by government to push for more meaningful and sustained action by all supermarkets – voluntary targets, such as those set out in the Courtauld Commitment 2025, are evidently not sufficient.

You can download a copy of the report via the link in the show-notes – go to http://foodiswasted.com/podcasts and navigate to the page for this podcast.

Before we launch into the interview, if you would like to receive future interviews as I publish them, then please subscribe to the podcast, and please also leave a rating or review – all of which will help ensure more people get to learn about the people and organisations I document, and the great work they are doing to reduce avoidable food waste.

Also, this interview is available as a video, which you can watch on the Food Is Wasted website, or on YouTube – just go to http://foodiswasted.com/youtube and you’ll be taken to the YouTube channel.

You can visit Feedback's website at http://feedbackglobal.org

Margaret Ritchie MP, of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

Food Is Wasted - Documenting the issue of food wasteBy Food Is WastedFeb 21, 2017