How Raley’s Is Fighting Food Waste

Raley’s is on an environmental mission to reduce its waste and use of micro-plastics, increase its recycling efforts, conserve water, focus on energy efficiencies and more. “Raley’s has taken an innovative stance on the environment because it creates value for our customers—and it’s the right thing to do,” says the West Sacramento, Calif.-based grocer’s website. “As a result, we continuously look for new technologies and strategies to reduce our carbon footprint.”

On the food waste front, for the past few years, Raley’s has used a software management program to identify expiring products with the goal of reducing food waste, said Raley’s Director of Sustainability Mark Koppang.

“We have been able to make a significant impact on food waste,” Koppang told WGB regarding Raley’s use of Pinpoint’s Date Check Pro software solution. “Over the past two years, we’ve prevented more than 500,000 pounds of food waste by identifying products expiring soon with Date Check Pro—some only needing to be rotated back to the front of the shelf and others needing a markdown.

“We’ve also been able to save our shoppers who purchase these discounted products more than $1 million in the past two years,” he continued. “Beyond products sold, we’ve also been able to donate significantly more products by catching them prior to expiration rather than after, but we haven’t quantified that exact impact so far.”

Raley’s, which implemented the software solution three years ago, finds Pinpoint’s program has been instrumental in assisting its in-store teams to identify near-code and out-of-code date items in a timely manner. “Doing so allows us to maximize our sell-through by rotating our stock, and also effectively identify items for donation prior to them going out of code and needing to be disposed of,” said Koppang.

While historically grocers have had to check each product’s sell-by date by hand, software management systems such as Pinpoint’s have streamlined the process and delivered results.

“Date Check Pro stems from my days spot checking dates at Festival Foods. I was never satisfied with the reactive nature of the work—hunting for the expired items by combing through section after section and filling up carts with already past-date food,” said Pinpoint Software Inc. CEO Andrew Hoeft. “The drive to find a more predictable way to prevent customers from finding those items before myself or my team did and saving the store money, was something I stirred over daily."

And while the use of the Date Check Pro hasn’t eliminated the need for Raley’s labor force to manage the identification and removal of expiring products, Koppang said, use of this program has “streamlined the process, allowing us to incrementally reduce our labor for this task.”

With sustainability becoming increasingly important to the grocery industry and businesses around the world, Raley’s is also focusing its environmental efforts and striving to make a difference in a number of areas including: