Food Waste Management: A Moral Dilemma of Food Service Managers
Have
you ever visited a supermarket and asked yourself, “Why are there so many
options? Where does all the unsold food end up?” These questions have recently become part of
a world-wide dialogue regarding food waste.
Food waste, or the disposal of food appropriate for human consumption,
has reached staggering heights as 850 million metric tons of food is wasted
annually in the United States. While
food waste can occur anywhere along the food supply chain, retail and wholesale
stores and their managers are key to addressing this issue.
The
business goals of stores are to provide a wide variety of products and product
availability, while minimizing the financial burden and complying with legal
regulations. Large inventories result in
the inevitable repurposing of food for charities, animal feed, and, most
commonly, disposal or recycling. In the
face of such extreme food waste, managers are now experiencing a moral burden when
required to dispose of unsalable, but still consumable, products while so many
people, including employees, are experiencing food insecurity. As a result, stores are now reexamining their
goals to help ease the moral burden of the store managers and find new avenues
for food upcycling.
Although
store managers must fight battles against regulatory bodies dictating
expiration or sell-by dates, as well as societal expectations for product
quality and availability, the solution is clear. Recommendations to reduce food waste include
changing regulatory requirements to allow for more freedom to donate to
charities; adopting more effective training programs to eliminate accidental
food waste; and educating consumers to appropriately read expiration or sell-by
dates, make more mindful purchasing decisions, and be open to purchasing “abnormal
foods”. As stores work to mitigate
consumerism, store managers will have more autonomy to repurpose foods, help feed
the population, and ease their moral burden.
Gruber, V. v., Holweg, C.
c., & Teller, C. c. (2016). What a waste! Exploring the human reality of food
waste from the store manager's perspective. Journal Of Public Policy & Marketing, 35(1), 3-25. doi: 10.1509/jppm.14.095
LH
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