Less packaging or more food storage info? When green issues collide

A new report suggests they aren't doing enough to educate consumers on storage methods for fresh fruit and vegetables and are thus contributing to the 6.7 million tonnes of food thrown away each year in the UK. But when they alternative is extra packaging - which is equally likely to cause howls of protest from green campaigners - what's a supermarket to do?

The new report by Wrap, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, revealed that almost a third of the food we buy finds its way into our waste bins rather than our stomachs even though most it is perfectly edible. They calculate that £10 billion worth of food is discarded every year and a tenth of that isn't even out of date.

“These findings are staggering in their own right, but at a time when global food shortages are in the headlines this kind of wastefulness becomes even more shocking,” Environment Minister Joan Ruddock said. “This is costing consumers three times over. Not only do they pay for food they don't eat, there is also the cost of dealing with the waste and there are climate change costs to all of us of growing, processing, packaging, transporting, and refrigerating food that only ends up in the bin.”

The largest category of foods that are thrown away is fruit and veg which accounts for 40% of the total. Top of the charts are potatoes: 5.1 million are thrown away every day. Similarly 4.4 million apples get discarded every 24 hours, along with 2.8 million tomatoes, 1.6 million bananas and 1.2 million oranges.

To explore why the wastage occurs Wrap commissioned some consumer research with just under 300 individuals completing a food wastage survey and weekly diary and another 1000 telephoned to discover their food storage habits.

The results showed that only around a quarter of consumers store fruit in the fridge even though most items last longer when refrigerated. Similarly, 45% of people do not put vegetables in the fridge when they would last longer if they did so. They concluded that even if 5% of the produce being kept out of the fridge could be eaten rather than thrown away, that would mean 60,000 tonnes less waste.

But fruit and vegetable storage is not totally straight forward - consumers shouldn't simply stick everything in the fridge. For example, while oranges and pears will last up to two weeks longer if kept cold, bananas and pineapples are better out of the fridge, and potatoes and onions also don't need to be refrigerated.

The report showed that consumer knowledge of these facts was hazy at best so it then turned its attention to retailers, surveying five major supermarkets to see how well they convey storage information to their customers. With pre-packed fruit and vegetables the stores performed quite well, with four out of five registering at least 85% of these products with storage information.

But the report also found some problems. Small print was often used or the information was on the reverse of the label meaning customers must disrupt the package to read the information. Plus there were many mixed messages: some products were displayed in an ambient retail display with advice to 'refrigerate at home'; and for some products storage advice varied between different retailers.

Worse still is that for loose fruit and vegetable products, storage information was virtually non-existent (7%). But of course, to correct this problem, supermarkets would have to introduce more packaging, which carries its own environmental problems.