A number of supermarkets have agreed to reveal how much food they throw away each year.
Sainsburys, Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Waitrose, Marks and Spencer and the Co-op have also signed up to plans to reduce the amount of food sent to landfill sites.
By 2020, the aim is to cut the quantity sent from six per cent to just one per cent.
This news comes after Tesco admitted towards the end of 2013 that up to two-thirds of its fresh produce was thrown away, either by the customer or the store.
Food campaigner Vicki Hird, from Friends of the Earth, said: “Food waste has been growing over the last few decades because of the way supermarkets have driven consumption.”
She added that supermarkets need to take a long, hard, challenging look at their marketing strategies. She was quoted by the Daily Mirror as saying stores needed to educate consumers to accept “ugly” fruit and veg. She insisted food doesn’t have to “look cosmetically perfect” to taste good and called for more to be done.
The British Retail Consortium said waste figures would be published next year and that it would also work with shoppers to reduce the amount of food binned at home.
