Can
Walmart's food labels make a dent in America's $29bn food waste problem?
The retail giant will now require its suppliers to use a new date
label designed to ease safety worries and prevent food from being tossed away
too early
Walmart, one of the nation’s
largest food retailers, will requires suppliers of its private label Great Value line of products to use the
same, standardized date label for its non-perishable foods: “Best if used by”.
Photograph: Tim Boyle/Getty Images
If you’ve ever paused before tossing a can of food in the trash
after seeing the date on the label, you’re not alone.
Whether it’s because of habit, cultural norms or a genuine fear
of getting sick, most consumers err on the safe side and avoid foods that have
passed the date stamped on their labels. As a result, an enormous amount of the
food that goes uneaten around the world gets wasted at home. Confusion over
labels leadsAmericans to throw away an estimated
$29bn worth of still edible food each year.
Walmart, one of the nation’s largest food retailers, has been
working on a fix. It requires suppliers of its private label Great Value line of
products to use the same, standardized date label for its non-perishable foods:
“Best if used by”.
The company, which asked its suppliers to start making the
switch last year, is giving them until next month to comply. Frank Yiannas,
vice president of food safety for Walmart, says when the company last checked,
roughly 70% of suppliers had complied. While the company couldn’t say exactly
how many products will change in total, it said the number is in the thousands.
Walmart’s initiative to use clearer date labels dates back to
2013, when The Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources
Defense Council released a report called The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date
Labels Lead to Food Waste in America. The two groups referred
to date labels as “a key cause of the high and rising rates of waste in the
United States”.
“That really helped get our attention,” says Yiannas. Yiannas
points out that the world’s population is estimated to reach 9 billion by 2050.
“There’s a growing realization that we’re not going to be able to produce our
way to feeding 9 billion people, so we have to reduce food waste,” he says.
Decoding the labels
Confusion over date labels – such as “best by”, “use by” and
“sell by” – can often muddy the water for consumers looking to make sure
they’re not eating expired or unsafe food. It can also lead many consumers to
throw a great deal of food away prematurely.
Although one survey from the Food Marketing Institute found that as
many as 91% of consumers had at some point thrown away food
because they perceived it to be a safety risk, most date labels aren’t designed
to indicate safety. They’re merely supposed to tell consumers when the producer
believes the products will reach their peak quality.
A lack of federal regulation – and an array of different
state-level policies – adds to the confusing sea of options. US food companies
use dozens of different labels to describe what happens to their products over
time.
All this matters because the economic and environmental costs of
food waste are shockingly high. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, if
food waste were a country, it would be the third largest global greenhouse gas
emitter in the world. An estimated 25% of America’s freshwater use goes into
the producing food that doesn’t get eaten. The direct economic consequences of global food waste adds up to $750bn annually.
How Walmart came up with
a plan
Yiannis initiated research within Walmart about eliminating the
label confusion. He worked with the Institute of Food Technologists, Grocery
Manufacturers Association, the Food Marketing Institute and others to publish a white paper in 2014.
They came to many of the same conclusions as the Harvard law group and the
Natural Resources Defense Council: date labels cause unnecessary waste.
Next, Walmart surveyed its private label suppliers and found
that they were using as many as 47 different kinds of date labels. Then it
surveyed Walmart customers by showing them a list of the most commonly-used
date labels and asked: if they had to choose a label that indicated a change in
quality but not food safety, which one would it be?
“There was a clear winner: ‘best if used by’,” says Yiannas.
Respondents said the new language conveys that “it doesn’t mean it’s bad after
that day”.
With this data in mind, Walmart went to its merchants and
announced a national standard for its Great Value foods – which include
everything from peanut butter and canned tuna to pasta sauce and boxed mashed
potatoes. The company expects its effort to have a broader impact because most
of its suppliers also sell products with their own labels outside of Walmart.
The label change doesn’t cost manufacturers much because it mostly involves
reprogramming their label printers, Yiannis says.
Creating new labels alone isn’t enough. The company launched a
30-second video at its checkout counters explaining the new labels and offering
tips for reducing food waste, such as freezing leftovers. In one month, Yiannas
says it was seen 10 million times.
Walmart received help from the Harvard food law clinic in
crafting and rolling out its campaign. Emily Broad Leib, director of the law
clinic, says the data from the company’s survey of its customers, which led to
the “best if used by” label, is compelling. “Then we could tell people, ‘if you
see that label there’s no safety risk’. But if you see an ‘expired on’ label
there is a safety risk.”
Broad Leib has considered confusing date labels as one of the
“biggest components of household food waste” since she was approached by former
Trader Joe CEO Doug Rauch four years ago to help him maneuver a series of legal
hurdles to start Daily Table, a retail company that specialized
in excess or overstocked from grocery stores, food suppliers, manufacturers,
restaurants and growers sold at a discounted price.
She would like the government to set clear policies, such as a
list of prepared foods – think unpasteurized dairy and deli meats – from the
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the US Department of Agriculture that do
need the “expired on” label. She is already working with federal lawmakers to
address the lack of standards for date labeling: a
bill introduced by Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and
Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) in May aims to create the same
changes that are taking place at Walmart.
Will standardizing date labels really save a substantial
quantity of food? Yiannis says Walmart will likely do another customer survey
to find out. He points to a study done in the UK and says, “about 21% of food
wasted at home is due to confusion over date labels. Any dent we can make on
this figure is a good thing”.
Jonathan Bloom, author of American
Wasteland, says Walmart’s effort is a solid first step. “If you were
going to pick one chain to undertake this kind of initiative, it would be
Walmart – given their scale,” Bloom says. But he stresses that education is as
important as the labels themselves.
“People see a date on that package and they don’t want to eat
anything after that date [regardless of the text next to it],” Bloom says. “A
better solution would be making it so consumers don’t even see a date label,
and are less able to be confused.”
He also thinks Walmart should have gone one step further to
include the text “manufacturer’s suggestion only” on labels. As Bloom sees it,
the mere presence of date labels on food implies a purely linear relationship
between time and food safety that can be misleading.
“Getting more people to trust their senses before they turn to
the date on the package will lead to a lot less food wasted at home,” he says.
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