For a typical supermarket, bakery can typically be 30-40% of the surplus food, and while re-purposing, charity, community and store colleague donations and animal feed can help keep the products inside the human & animal food chain, there is much more that needs to be done to prevent the surplus in the first place. In this session, we heard about the "bread of yesterday", the idea of half baked bread on sale in the pm, the importance of determining category roles for each bakery item, and algorithms to determine the core lines to have available in the afternoon / early evening. Above all, we learnt from Mari at Meny, that an end to end approach can lead to more sales, and less waste, in fact, Mari reported that losses on bakery reduced by 34% since the introduction of her initiatives.

If you would like to join the working group or learn more about this session, please email Colin Peacock at colin@ecrloss.com