Instead of pursuing shoplifters, the big supermarkets should use their record profits to prevent food waste – The Guardian

Australia’s supermarket giants have been making a lot of noise about the spike in shoplifting across the country and the impact it is having on their business.

“We are seeing it in every store and every category, it’s a real challenge,” Coles chief operating officer Matt Swindells told 3AW radio station last week. Brad Banducci, CEO of Woolworths, told ABC Radio National there has been a “dramatic rise” of stock loss at his stores, including theft.

Both supermarkets have started rolling out a suite of new high-tech security measures to crack down on five-finger discounts, including installing facial recognition technology at self-service checkouts and fitting trolleys with sensors that can track when a person hasn’t exited through a checkout area, or hasn’t paid for their products, and lock the wheels.

But it is hard to feel much sympathy for Coles and Woolworths knowing that, despite the growing theft, they have just recorded annual profits of $1.1bn and $1.6bn respectively. This is off the back of soaring inflation, which has pushed up the cost of basic goods and helped fuel a cost-of-living crisis.

It’s even harder to feel sympathy for them knowing that while they complain about having their goods stolen, they – along with other supermarket chains – continue to throw out vast volumes of stock. As Banducci told media last week, theft was just “one of the components [of] stock loss”.

On a recent trip to the loading zone at my local Woolies in Sydney, the bins were so heavy I struggled to move them. One was completely full of sourdough loaves and other baked goods – all of them still soft and fresh. Dumped into the other bins were bananas, oranges, mandarins, avocados, tomatoes, punnets of apples, eggplants, organic green beans, bundles of asparagus, green capsicums, 2kg bags of washed potatoes, mushrooms, various fancy cheeses, 5kg packets of basmati rice, muesli bars, cartons of a dozen eggs, tubs of yoghurt and long-life milk – all in edible condition.

It was impossible to tell why most of this food had been thrown into the bin; even the food that was slightly damaged, a little overripe or approaching its “best before” date looked fine to eat.

The quantity and variety of food in the bins is sadly representative of the amount of food thrown out every week by the supermarkets. Around 7.6m tonnes of food is wasted every year in Australia – 70% of which is perfectly edible, according to Food Bank.

Although this food is wasted at every point along the food supply and consumption chain, major supermarkets such as Coles and Woolworths bear an especially large portion of blame for it: as well as dumping binloads of food themselves, they enforce strict cosmetic standards which mean producers are often forced to throw away fine fruit and vegetables that simply do not meet size, shape and appearance specifications.

This is reprehensible – especially amid a cost-of-living crisis when so many people across the country are struggling to eat. And yet, despite perpetuating the obscene level of food waste, Australia’s supermarkets pat themselves on the back for donating surplus food to rescue organisations and selling a small selection of oddly shaped or sized – but perfectly edible – fresh produce in their stores.

If Australia’s two major supermarkets really want to be responsible corporate citizens, they should start investing some of their record profits into preventing food waste in the first place, instead of spending it on greenwashing tactics and invasive security measures to target petty theft.

• Drew Rooke is a freelance journalist and writer. His most recent book, A Witness of Fact: The Peculiar Case of Chief Forensic Pathologist Colin Manock (Scribe Publications, 2022), was shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly award for best true crime