At Iceland we hate the idea of waste and, while less than 1% of our food is currently unsold, we are working hard to reduce this amount even further.
We are proud to be a signatory of the Courtauld 2025 Commitment. This is a voluntary agreement that brings together organisations across the food industry to reduce the environmental impact of food and drink. By getting involved we have agreed to play our part in reducing the UK’s food and drink waste by 20% by 2025. We are also a signatory to the WRAP/IGD Food Waste Roadmap and have signed the Government’s Step Up To The Plate pledge.
Furthermore, and in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal SDG 12.3, we have set ourselves a target to achieve a 50% reduction of food waste in our own operations by 2030, with 2017/18 as our baseline year.
Since 2017/18, we have reduced food waste in our own operations by 23.2%. Read our 2019/20 food waste report here.
We do not send any unsold food to landfill. Instead we put it to good use in the community; convert it to animal feed or beer; or use it to produce electricity and compost through a process called anaerobic digestion.
Our focus on frozen food helps to cut waste throughout the supply chain, in stores and in customers’ homes. We have established a partnership with social enterprise Community Shop, part of the Company Shop Group, that is putting surplus food from our depots to good use in the community, and have donated freezers to food banks run by the Trussell Trust and Feeding Britain. We are currently examining ways to repurpose unsold food from our stores, and will trial a solution in Summer 2020.