Food retail waste and loss management and CSR

Retailers are continually developing initiatives to embed corporate social responsibility (CSR) in everyday business practices, especially in food retail. This chapter presents an ex-post consideration of a research project undertaken for a major European food retailer to address one CSR aspect: reducing food waste and loss in downstream retail operations. The chapter’s objective is to highlight how extant management practices and processes may inhibit substantive changes required to implement CSR. The project was a single case study employing an action research method and retail distribution and supply chain management theory to investigate root causes and suggest solutions. Three major issues emerged from analysis at the interim report stage: a lack of a holistic approach to loss and waste related to different and unaligned performance measures among the retailer’s three different management groups—the merchandising or trading group, the logistics and supply chain group, and the in-store retail management group; a lack of both sufficient stock visibility and forecasting accuracy. The latter two issues resulted from the lack of a holistic approach. Given these issues and potential impacts on its operational culture by reorganizing responsibility for loss and waste, the retailer cancelled the project at that stage.