Feeding Families, not Landfills

Feeding families is at the heart of what we do. On our mission to reduce food waste in our operations, we’re working with likeminded partners to reduce food waste in our stores and supply chain and are engaging our customers to reduce waste at home. Our approach to reducing food waste is based on the following three tiers:

  1. Preventing food loss and waste from happening in our stores, warehouses and across our supply chain
  2. Re-using and re-distributing as much surplus food as possible
  3. Finding alternative waste streams to landfill
Inverse pyramid depicting three steps to reducing food waste: 1) Prevent, 2) Re-use and Redistribute, and 3) Alternatives to Landfill

Featured Story

Thrifty Foods Food Rescue Project Video.

Goals & Progress

Highlights of How We’re Making a Difference

Young boy drinking a smoothie.

Yesterday’s Produce Nurtures Tomorrow’s Minds

At our Allen Street Sobeys store in PEI, a local partnership blossomed with Prince Street School to provide smoothies for school breakfasts and help reduce food waste. The program uses imperfect produce that no longer meets the needs of our customers as ingredients for nutritious smoothies. Store Manager, Jeff Jenkins, and Chef, Nathan Schoenfeldt, helped donate our less-than-perfect produce and crafted delicious, nutritious smoothie recipes for the school’s breakfast program to help nourish young minds.

Helping Canadians Prevent Food Waste

We face significant challenges with food waste and food insecurity in Canada: The average Canadian throws out about 170 kilograms of food per year. Still, one in eight households struggles to access healthy food every day. Our partnership with Love Food Hate Waste helps educate Canadians about how to reduce food waste in their homes. By sharing delicious recipes designed to repurpose ingredients at home, our campaign helps people use up what they have and reduce the amount of food they throw out.

Love Food Hate Waste Canada logo.
Feed Nova Scotia logo

Delivering Healthy Food to Nova Scotians in Need

We are passionate about feeding families. Unfortunately, many of our neighbours do not have the resources to put healthy food on the table. In 2017, our Sobeys stores and distribution centres launched a food rescue program in collaboration with Feed Nova Scotia. The program donates surplus food that no longer meets the needs of our customers but is still safe for consumption to more than 100 local food banks and food programs, annually contributing to more than 100,000 meals across the province.

Juicing to New Heights

We have partnered with Montreal-based LOOP, which produces juices, smoothies, and other beverages from imperfect-looking or injured produce, in an effort to reduce avoidable food waste. LOOP collaborates with major food industry actors to save perfectly good products from being discarded in landfills before they ever reach the grocery store. We are proud to be the first national grocery retailer to provide rescued produce to LOOP from our warehouses. Over the past year, through our partnership with LOOP, we have prevented 547 tonnes of produce from going to landfill, avoiding 481 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, and saving nearly 50 million liters of water... Read More

Learn more about their products here: https://loopmission.com/ Read Less

Loop Juices product.

This post is also available in: French