Monitoringder Lebensmittelabfälle und -weitergabeim Dialogforum Groß- und Einzelhandel2019/2020 : Betrachtung der Abschreibungen

This report compares the sales losses in form of markdowns of the companies participating in the Dialogue Forum Wholesale and Retail to Reduce Food Waste with each other and between 2019 and 2020. In addition, the fractions food waste and redistribution of food are stressed in order to derive political and corporate options for action. The calculations are based on voluntarily provided data on markdowns from 16 food retail and cash & carry companies, which together are represented by about 16,000 sales outlets, as well as data from five food wholesale companies. These markdowns include food waste as well as food redistribution, e.g. to food banks. Due to a lack of accounting data, an expert estimate of 30 % is used as the redistribution rate for human consumption. The analysed markdown rates for food retail and cash & carry companies were 1.76 % in 2019 and only 1.54 % in 2020. These markdown rates in monetary terms were then converted into physical units, which in 2020 corresponded to approximately 246 thousand tonnes. For 15 out of 16, the markdown rates are below 3%. The participating companies in the food wholesale trade were able to reduce the markdown rates in individual commodity groups from 2019 to 2020. More than half of the companies have markdown rates below 1 % in the various product groups. However, sales-averaged depreciation rose from 0.23 % (2019) to 0.35 % (2020) across all commodity groups. The increase is mainly due to a few outliers in the product groups fruit and vegetables, bread and bakery products and meat, fish and poultry with depreciation rates greater than 5 %. Model projects of the Thünen Institute with four companies of the Dialogue Forum to improve the pass-on data have shown that there is still potential here to significantly increase the pass-on share and thus reduce food waste (cf. also Chapter 4). This applies in particular to the product groups with the highest rates of write-off in the eLEH (fruit and vegetables and bread and bakery products). Further data collection on food transfers and food waste is recommended. From this, new efficient measures to reduce food waste can be derived.