France gives unsold supermarket food a second life by helping the needy

    by Unexplained222

    25 Comments

    1. mulberrybushes on

      the UK, Luxembourg and I’m sure lots of other countries do this without benefit of a specific legislation.

      The French law has been in place since 2020.

    2. stonewallgamer on

      Its vile that they don’t do this already and it’s even more vile that they have been forced to do it. Why isn’t it the standard? Greedy, bloodsucking corporations that care about pieces of paper more than the life of another.

    3. AirsickIowlander on

      I work for a large grocery store chain, managed the produce department for about a year and have worked in several other departments as well. The amount of perfectly good food we throw away daily is insane, my one store alone could probably keep every homeless person in my medium sized city fed with what we throw away. If a law like this were passed here there would be no hungry people in the US. And it wouldn’t cost the store a penny.

    4. AdDisastrous6738 on

      In the US, as soon as someone got sick from eating something expired they would sue.
      I worked for a local grocery store chain in the early 2000s and they would sell or give away dented cans of food. Some lady said that she got sick and sued the company. Even though the company was found not liable they were still out thousands of dollars in court costs. We had to start throwing everything away after that.

    5. Honestly, if it’s going to be damaged out anyway, businesses aren’t losing shit by doing this. They’ve already paid for the product to be on the shelves. It did not sell. So it is now a loss. Give it away. The only reason retailers don’t want to do this is because they’re worried people will just hold out from buying because they think they might get what they need for free, but I don’t think this would actually happen enough to make an impact because what is left over is usually stuff people don’t want. Furthermore, the advent of AI should be leading to more intelligent, accurate purchasing decisions, resulting in minimal waste.

    6. How does it work in reality? Does the supermarket need to handle the logistics from the supermarket to the food banks?

    7. Not the first country, the Chinese have vending machines for such tasks. China was the first.

    8. So, all I would have to do to help the needy is to avoid buying stuff that is near expiry?

      Ok, deal me in

    9. Impossible_War4488 on

      Last month right before Christmas , there is a dollar store close to my apartment so I walk over there a lot , and I went in one day and a girl that works there was walking around kind of teary eyed almost crying and I asked her what’s wrong. She showed me in the back they had a huge stock of toys like crates filled with old toys from last year that they couldn’t put out onto the shelves. The company was making her destroy all the old toys to be thrown away because they couldn’t sell them for whatever policy reason and aren’t allowed to give them away. So she was back there destroying toys that could have been donated a week before Christmas because of company policy. It’s really fucked how policy and regulation forces such waste especially in situations where it’s so easy to see donating the stuff would have been the right thing to do.

    10. Here in NL supermarkets work with food banks but the tricky thing is:

      – It adds more cost than just throwing it away
      – It adds risk in the form of people consuming expired food

      Of course no one is inherrently against supermarkets cooperating with foodbanks, but forcing a company to donate to charitible causes doesn’t feel correct either.

    11. Meanwhile in the US we pour bleach on perfectly good food so homeless people can’t dumpster dive for it. Wild that “don’t waste food, feed hungry people” is somehow a revolutionary concept.

    Leave A Reply