MARKS and Spencer’s is scrapping best before dates to help reduce in-store and household food waste.
Dates will be removed from over 300 fruit and vegetable products – 85% of M&S’ produce offering – including commonly wasted items apples, potatoes and broccoli.
Instead the supermarket giant will use a new code which M&S store colleagues will use to ensure freshness and quality is maintained.
The change, which is being rolled out across all M&S UK stores from this week, is designed to encourage customers to throw away less edible food at home by using their judgement.
Research from WRAP shows that an estimated 6.6m million tonnes of food is thrown away by UK households a year.
As part of its Plan A sustainability roadmap, M&S has pledged to halve food waste by 2030, with 100% of edible surplus to be redistributed by 2025.
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As well as reducing the number of best before dates, the retailer is taking several steps to reduce food waste and helping its 30 million customers and 70,000 colleagues to do the same.
Andrew Clappen, Director of Food Technology, said: “We’re determined to tackle food waste – our teams and suppliers work hard to deliver fresh, delicious, responsibly sourced produce at great value and we need to do all we can to make sure none of it gets thrown away.
“To do that, we need to be innovative and ambitious – removing best before dates where safe to do so, trialling new ways to sell our products and galvanising our customers to get creative with leftovers and embrace change.
“The other side of the challenge is making sure anything edible we don’t sell reaches those who need it most.
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“By partnering with Neighbourly since 2015 we’ve ensured over 44million meals are redistributed to local communities.”
Catherine David, Director of Collaboration and Change at WRAP said: “We’re thrilled to see this move from M&S, which will reduce food waste and help tackle the climate crisis.
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“Removing dates on fresh fruit and veg can save the equivalent of 7 million shopping baskets of food being binned in our homes.
“We urge more supermarkets to get ahead on food waste by axing date labels from fresh produce, allowing people to use their own judgement.”
