Focusing on high-rotation, perishable products like salads, fruits and ready-to-eat meals, one of the largest Spanish retailers bet on Wasteless to reduce waste and increasing top line revenues by 6%.
Minimizing their environmental impact has long been part of a leading Spanish retailer’s principles. Food waste reduction is a key tactic to achieve this goal. They implemented several initiatives to address inefficiencies in logistics and in-store operations. However, ineffective inventory management and arbitrary end-of-life markdowns continued to result in high food waste percentages and loss of margin. The retailer searched for a solution to improve end-of-life markdowns without increasing operational efforts and labor costs.
The main causes of food waste were:
The leading retailer and Wasteless determined to focus initially on products with high levels of waste, high freshness sensitivity, high rotation and limited shelf life. For this reason, packed salads, sandwiches, and cut fruit were selected as the best candidates for waste reduction using dynamic pricing. In addition to waste reduction and margin impact monitoring, the retailer was focused on understanding how their customers reacted to the dynamic pricing tests.
Following a 12 week program, food waste was reduced by 32.7%, and revenue grew by 6.2%. In customer surveys, an impressive 98% of respondents had an improved image of the store and its eco-friendly perception.
