During recycling week, 14th-20th October, we have been working with WRAP on their BeMighty campaign to show the importance of recycling food waste at home. But at Iceland, we are also doing a lot of work to reduce the amount of food waste we are producing in the first instance.
We have made changes to our labelling across products like milk, yogurt and hard cheese to include ‘Best Before’ messaging rather than a ‘Use By’ date. These products are commonly wasted due to being past their use by date, but are often still safe for consumption. Therefore, we have switched to using best before dates to encourage consumers to judge for themselves whether they can still be used. To ensure you are not wasting edible food, use the sensory tests to check whether it is okay to eat before binning. Some products, like bread, will show visible signs of mould indicating they are no longer safe to eat. For dairy products, you can use a ‘sniff test’ after the best before date to see whether they have soured. You can even taste some products with a best before date such as crisps and biscuits to assess whether they have gone stale or are still possible to eat.
We have also been working to extend the shelf life of products and increase the minimum life on receipt (MLOR) at depot to ensure that customers are getting the longest use possible. Recently we have changed the packaging of all of our fresh mince products to extend their shelf life and ensure that they remain fresher for longer. You can read more about this here. In total, thirty-two of our other meat products have also had their life extended including beef steaks, pork steaks, lamb chops and roasting joints. We are also continually assessing MLOR and encouraging our suppliers to increase this to ensure customers get the maximum usage out of items. In the last two years we have increased the MLOR of seventy one products in an attempt to reduce both household and store waste. These include meat products, bakery products, and fresh fruit and veg.
Browse our recipes to see how you can reduce your food waste at home whilst recycling.