Marks and Spencer Food Waste

moonrakerz

eyelinerprincess wrote: »

Think that's bad? Dad works in a bakery and today they threw away in the region of 30,000 loaves because "they were 2mm too small".

Financially, that is a better bet than selling 30,000 underweight loaves and being fined £100,000 !

eeeeen

Melon78 wrote: »

I used to work for M&S, my mum still does. Food is generally sold with 75%off to staff so certainly not thrown away.

Affraid your wrong there M&S throw a massive amount of food away, yes staff do get a chance to buy at a knock down rate ( depends on store management) but staff can only fill there freezers so much and that then leads to staff being choosey. The waste does centre a lot round the food to go range but not does go across the range. There is an automated ordering system and dispite the fact it you are pro active to stop orders it was very rare you could stop it as the computer knew best, food would on occasions not even go out on the shop floor but straight into the skip, massive wastage occurs I should know I use to manage one.

eyelinerprincess

moonrakerz wrote: »

Financially, that is a better bet than selling 30,000 underweight loaves and being fined £100,000 !

The spec said they could be out +-5mm, but quality control said "nope, throw it all out", all because they had mucked about with the settings.

BusinessStudent

This is what happens in the M&S I work in

The sandwiches are sold for 20p each to the staff after the store shuts - after this every waste item not sold is donated to charity!

Premier_2

eyelinerprincess wrote: »

The spec said they could be out +-5mm, but quality control said "nope, throw it all out", all because they had mucked about with the settings.

Ah, the intricacies of sampling, statistical distribution and the statisticians favourite, the standard deviation!

Simply put, if you make 30,000 so called identical items, they will infact vary in size, distributed about the mean (average) size

If this is a normal distribution, 99.7% (i.e.almost all) will fall within +/- 3sd

This is probably where the +/- 5mm allowed tolerance comes in.

However, if the mean length is already scewed 2/5 towards the allowable minimum length, then clearly some loaves will be less than the allowable minimum length. Therefore, the only way to avoid a fine for selling undersized loaves is to either measure each one (probably too expensive), discarding those that fall below the minimum size allowed, or scrap the lot.

Here endeth todays lesson on statistical distribution.

Lady_E

I have a friend who used to work at M&S and a lot of their stuff was offered to their staff either in the staff shop or after closing time for knockdown prices. One Xmas , there were a lot of turkeys over which were put into the skip. Management declared that there would be "health and safety issues" if they had been given to the local homeless charity. Basically if someone was poisoned by the turkeys then M&S did not want to be held responsible. That is why she is very sceptical of their "Plan A" initiative as she saw at first hand their lack of social responsbility.

Edinburghlass_2

In fact M&S are starting to reduce their products now around mid afternoon with a large yellow sticker.

chou_123

I recently worked in M&S, and the hypocrisy of their Plans to save the environment was profound. We were only a small store, yet we would usually have about two trolleyfuls of waste each night, sometimes more. Some would be sold to staff at reduced prices - but no-one wanted stuff that couldn't be fozen or eaten in the next few days. Charities did come, but we weren't allowed to give them dairy or meat products. And the amount of waste we had at Christmas is ridiculous - about 20 trolleyfuls! I remember, we did once reduce items. But it didn't happen often. A lot of staff were disgusted that we couldn't sell this reduced stuff to customers - the amount of waste is appalling.

LilMissEmmylou

its odd how some stores are happy to give meat away to charity but others dont. I know in Harpenden they give meat to a charity as I can remember a friend telling me they found it hard to actually use all the turkeys they got one Christmas. I do agree though I hate seeing stores throw food away. Almost makes you want more freegans around. I used to work in a Greggs store and they threw out so much food it was unreal! I had a lovely store manager who would let us bring whatever we wanted from the "waste" away with us, but even when i was bringing bag fulls back for the people i shared my house with there was still trays full of food being binned.

faerie_girl

probally goes to the staff canteen. Thats what happens in Morrisons, they seem to think their staff enjoy the taste of stale bread.