To: Supermarket CEO's & The Parlement

Perfectly Good Food Belongs on Plates, Not in Skips

We call on the UK Government to make it illegal for large supermarkets to bin edible food — and to make them prove it.

Why is this important?

Then four demands, in the order a decision-maker can actually act on them:

  1. Ban the destruction of edible surplus. Supermarkets above a set floor size must offer unsold, in-date food to charities and redistribution partners before it goes anywhere near a skip.
  2. Require a donation agreement. Every large store signs a standing arrangement with at least one local food charity or redistribution scheme — no more "we couldn't find anyone to take it."
  3. Make food waste reporting mandatory and public. Annual, audited, store-level figures published by every large food business, so over-ordering shows up in black and white.
  4. Set a legal reduction target with penalties for missing it. Voluntary pledges have had their decade.

There is currently no legal bar on UK supermarkets destroying edible food and no statutory duty to redistribute it — the system runs on goodwill, which is our strongest single line of argument. ukpolitics And France has done exactly what we're asking for since 2016: large stores are forbidden from destroying unsold food and must donate it instead, so this is a proven policy rather than a hypothetical. The Guardian letsrecycle

I'm a chef. Twenty years in high-end restaurants and catering, and I'm 37 years old.

I know what goes into a single crate of vegetables. Someone grew it. Someone picked it in the cold. It was washed, graded, packed, chilled, driven across the country. By the time it reaches a shelf, dozens of people and hundreds of miles are standing behind it.

And then, because a store ordered more than it could sell, it goes in a skip. Still good. Still in date. Still exactly the food I'd have been proud to cook and serve.

In my kitchens, wasting food is a sackable failure. We cost every portion, we use every trim, we plan our orders around what we'll actually sell. If a restaurant ran the way supermarket ordering runs, it would be closed inside a year.

I'm not asking supermarkets to do anything my industry hasn't done for decades. I'm asking them to stop treating perfectly good food as disposable — and to be made to prove they've stopped.