Food waste is an urgent environmental and social issue. We have committed to reduce food waste by 20% by 2025, and halve it by 2030 (relative to 2017 baseline), in line with the Courtauld 2030 and UN SDG Champions 12.3 commitments. This goal has vital importance to reduce the environmental impact of wasted food, and to help alleviate food poverty.
To achieve these commitments we are working hard to prevent waste in our operations where possible, and when waste does happen, to ensure we have partnerships to distribute surplus food to charities. We also work with our suppliers to minimise waste and we support a range of industry initiatives.
We support WRAP’s UK Food Waste Reduction Roadmap, an industry-wide programme that guides businesses to target, measure and act upon food waste. It aims to achieve a 50% reduction in food waste in the UK by 2030.
• We have reduced our wastage intensity by 57% since 2017, when we first published our data (please see our full reporting methodology for years pertaining to 2017-2021 here, and 2022 here).
• Following a successful trial, we have introduced up to 75% price reductions on fresh produce, bakery and chilled products that are near the end of their shelf life to reduce wastage.
• We have also rolled out 30% price reductions on ambient items that have imperfect outer packaging.
• We have removed best before dates from around 60 fresh fruit and vegetable lines, including apples and pears, citrus fruits, potatoes, carrots and onions.
• We have been working in partnership with Neighbourly since 2019 and have linked all of our stores with local groups to donate surplus fruit and vegetables, bakery, long-life products and flowers. Across 2021 and 2022, we donated over 17 million meals via this partnership.
• We have expanded our redistribution programme with Neighbourly to include weekends, and trialled the donation of chilled food products to donate even more food to local groups. Find out how much Aldi has donated to charities, and the community groups your local store donates to here.
• We support our growers to reduce waste by flexing agreements to accommodate crop failures and gluts, such as introducing larger pack sizes for a limited time.
• In 2021 Aldi conducted its first Whole Chain Plan, mapping waste from farm to fork at one of its potato suppliers. The learnings from the Whole Chain Plan are being used to extend the shelf life of the product through investigating improvements in packaging design.
• We have supported our suppliers via our partnership with The Company Shop Group, to save 14,538 tonnes of surplus food (2015-2022) that would have been wasted. This equates to 34,614,286 meals.
• In 2023, following a successful trial in our Cardiff Regional Distribution Centre (RDC), we rolled out a National process to allow our RDCs to donate rejected stock to Company Shop (this does not impact our wastage intensity).
• We help our customers to reduce food waste by promoting WRAP’s Love Food Hate Waste campaign in stores, on social media, in our in-store leaflets and suggesting food waste saving tips to our customers.
• Aldi supported WRAP’s Food Waste Action Week in 2021, 2022 and 2023 to raise awareness of consumer waste and the links to climate change.
• Following a successful trial across 3 Regions, in 2023 we have rolled out Too Good to Go across all of our stores to further reduce our food waste and increase our value offering for our customers.
• Monitoring our food waste more closely through robust and more detailed reporting and engaging with the right teams to identify waste hotspots, and clear priority actions for the business.
• Trialling additional food surplus redistribution routes.
• Engaging our supply chain to perform whole chain analyses and identify waste hotspots from ‘farm to fork’.
• Engaging with consumers to help drive waste reduction in the home.
• Investigating processes to turn food that can’t be donated into animal feed.
Across 2021 and 2022, we donated over 17 million meals to charities such as shelters, after school clubs, food banks and more.
* Based on a conversion factor of 1 tonnes = 0.00042 meals
Our food waste report includes data from all stores and regional distribution centres in the UK. In 2017, we established our food waste intensity baseline as being 1.16%, meaning 1.16% of sales ended up as waste (please refer to our full reporting methodology for the UK for years pertaining to 2017-2021 here, and 2022 here).
Since 2017, our food waste intensity has improved year-on-year, and in 2022, 0.50% of our food handled ended up as food waste.
We have also reduced our overall food waste in our operations by c.40% from 2017 to 2022 (Please click here for further details on reporting methodology for years 2017-2021, and here for 2022).
Deloitte LLP has been engaged in 2022 and 2023 to provide independent assurance over the food waste intensity metric using the symbol Δ in accordance with the International Standard for Assurance Engagements 3000 (“ISAE 3000”). Deloitte’s full qualified assurance opinion, which includes details of the selected information assured, can be found for years pertaining to 2017-2021 here, and unqualified opinion for 2022 here.
The level of assurance provided for a limited assurance engagement is substantially lower than a reasonable assurance engagement. In order to reach their opinion, Deloitte LLP performed a range of procedures. A summary of the work Deloitte LLP performed is included within their assurance statement.
The Reporting Criteria that we used as the basis of preparing selected data on this webpage are our Food Waste Reporting – Public Methodology Statements for the relevant years and can be seen within the downloadable PDFs below. This webpage needs to be read together with the Reporting Criteria.
