I have found a new way to save money on food — and help save the planet in the process. I had thought there was nothing more I could do to cut back on bills and waste. But the next logical step has just been delivered to my door: a box full of items that supermarkets cannot sell but are still fit to eat.
According to Approved Food, the leading online seller of clearance produce, the goods would have cost me £64.08 (Dh356) in a supermarket but I have paid only £13.02 (Dh72) — plus the £5.25 (Dh29) postage — for this 22-kilo package. Some of the items will be past, or close to, their sell-by dates; others will be surplus to requirements.
No trash material
Until a year or so ago, these goods would have been consigned to the bin but now I can save eight litres of Heinz Dijon mustard from landfill, where every tonne of food waste generates 6.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide. Not only do I now have enough mustard to make salad dressing for the rest of my life, I have contributed to the "war on waste".
Food waste is one of the scandals of our time. The latest statistics from the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme suggest the UK bins 20 million tonnes of food every year. Households put 8.3 million tonnes of once-edible food in bins, or £50 (Dh278) from the average family's monthly shopping bill. Tempted by greed and "bogof'' deals — buy one, get one free — we buy more than we need, cook more than we can eat, then chuck out far more than we should. A few individuals are manically frugal, including the man who posted this comment on a recycling website: "When I do boiled potatoes, I use the same water to do some rice and then I put that into cartons and freeze it."
Smart trial
Without becoming obsessive, there must be more we can do to cut back. We can, for one thing, look out for "bogof later" offers. Tesco and Sainsbury's are trialling "buy one now, get one free next time" schemes, in which shoppers can postpone a free second promotional product until a later trip.
It's a small gesture but timely, given the release of Food, Inc, the Oscar-nominated documentary for which Stella McCartney hosted a glitzy UK premiere. Food, Inc aims to do for the food industry what Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth did for climate change. In Britain, people are perhaps more aware than Americans of the less-than-picturesque way food is produced.
Writers Felicity Lawrence and Joanna Blythman and television presenters Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall have opened eyes. But Food, Inc will induce indigestion. So here I am, voting to reduce waste — if not my waist — by buying superannuated biscuits and bags of unwanted pistachio nuts from Approvedfood.co.uk.
"It's a crime to send this to landfill," says Dan Cluderay, the software engineer-turned-market store holder who set up the company in 2008. He is about to expand from his football-pitch sized warehouse outside Sheffield into a 12-depot network. During the 20 minutes for which we talk, Cluderay receives calls from three suppliers eager to offload water, tinned peas and sweets. Often they are in despair; Cluderay is not surprised, given the way they say they are treated by supermarkets. "A supermarket might order a million of an item, start by taking half a million and decide not to take the rest, leaving the suppliers with a lot of marked-up products they can't sell."
Recently, the government introduced a code to curb supermarkets' bullying behaviour towards suppliers, who are made to pay fines for the tiniest of transgressions and take the knock if a product is discounted.
But Hilary Benn, the Environment Secretary, has not followed through on promises to get rid of the largely meaningless "best-before" labels that result in 370,000 tonnes of waste because supermarkets won't take goods with less than 75 per cent of the time before that date left to run.
Best-before and sell-by dates are a convenience for shelf stackers. Unlike "use-by" dates, they do not safeguard the public, yet lead to appalling waste. "Food that cannot be sold has no commercial value," says Tony Lowe, chief executive of Fair Share, which takes food that would otherwise be destroyed and gives it to charities which turn it into meals at drop-in centres.
Rescue mission
Lowe, who used to work for Marks & Spencer, cannot understand why supermarkets have been slow to offload their surpluses when it costs less than the cost of destruction to give it to Fair Share. "We use 90 per cent of the food given to us — anything from lobsters to Pot Noodles — and last year we rescued 3,100 tonnes that would have been destroyed. We could do five times that amount — enough to fill 28,000 articulated lorries — if they only gave it to us."
Even if he achieves his aim, there will still be plenty left for the online purveyors of discount foods.
New move
At present, having opened my box, I don't think these are the answer to anyone's weekly shop. The range is small and consists largely of foods I would never normally buy, such as tinned new potatoes. That will start changing very soon, Cluderay promises.
"We are about to move to next-day delivery," he says. "That means we can sell fresh fruit and vegetables." The next step will be chilled foods. But right now these rescued goods are causing me a new waste problem. What I am going to do with 12 packets of Super Cook Belgian Chocolate Scrolls? I can't now bin them. Would anyone like some Dijon mustard?
