Regarding donation, yes, it’s legal issues (or so I’m told), although some chains, including Whole Foods, have reportedly made some arrangements to productively divert their surplus.

And here in Fresno not everything is sold by barcode…they sell individual apples and bananas :/

If we’re talking dishonesty I think TJs throwing out food is even more dishonest then advertising cantaloupes for .33 because they do so many things so well, like paying a “living wage”, having lots of organics, encouraging reusable bags with their weekly $25 drawings, NOT advertising, carrying fair trade chocolate and coffee, as well as catering to people with special dietary needs like dairy and gluten free without the price gouging like Whole Foods. To me it feels like more of a betrayal. I dunno, could easily become another cause to join in an effort to save the world

Trader Joe’s business model also involves selling absolutely everything by the piece, or by bar-code. There are no bulk or by-weight items, and it’s not (financially) worth paying for the labor that would be required to re-package the apricots, when only one is going bad (they all get tossed) or to sort and re-package the eggs when just one is tossed (they all get tossed… tens of dozens every day, at every store: and this at least, I suspect is true of virtually all supermarkets). There’s a terrible thing to realize here, which is that what we consider a barely “living wage” in the US, (i.e. the $11/hr plus modest benefits of a Trader Joe’s employee, which translates to something like $20k/yr after taxes) is at some level economically incompatible with the kind of material resource conservation that we environmentalists say we’d like to see. For it to make sense to sort the apricots and eggs, they either need to cost much more (increasing the food portion of the cost of living), or the labor has to be cheaper (as it likely is at a low-end chain grocery store or Super WalMart: minimum wage with absolutely no benefits whatsoever, where they do more sorting.) At least, under the current economic arrangement we have. Maybe there’s some other way to arrange things, but it’s not clear to me what that arrangement would look like.

I suspect that there are at least 2 tiers of grocery stores. In the upper (fancier) tier, it’s not acceptable to have cosmetically imperfect, or otherwise borderline produce laying around, but in the lower tiers, it is. When we do shop, we shop in lower tier stores (small ethnic groceries) and a lot of why things are cheaper there is because they’re often cosmetically imperfect. They certainly do lower prices to clear excess stock. This is how one imagines capitalism is supposed to work, no?

I’d also be very skeptical about Save Mart’s claim that they compost their excess produce. Skeptical enough to go take a late-night look in their bins. It would be absolutely great if they’re doing it, but I suspect it’s greenwashing BS. Watch this news clip from Australia if you haven’t already to see a couple of examples of outright lies from supermarket chains about throwing out good food (let alone what they do with actually spoiled food). The basic problem (as laid out by one of the interviewees) is that the actual cost of the produce is a relatively small proportion of their cost of doing business, disposal is nearly free, and there isn’t a well developed market, or supply chain, in place for dealing with collecting all that organic matter and turning it into valuable compost at a scale that makes commercial sense.

The Growing Power urban farm is another wonderful example of someone diverting this waste stream and making something valuable out of it. But even at the considerable scale that they’re operating at, it’s still not really a profit-making venture. It’s self sufficient, and they get a lot of quasi-volunteer labor, and free nutrient inputs, and their mission is more about bringing high-quality fresh foods to the inner city than it is about being a successful commercial venture.