App helps supermarkets donate surplus food to charities
Melanie May | 10 March 2016 | News
An app that helps food retailers donate their surplus food to charity is being rolled out in Tesco stores across the UK.
TAAP’s Food Surplus Application is available to all food retailers and was introduced into a number of Tesco stores at Christmas 2015 where it has been integrated with FareShare FoodCloud, which matches charities and community groups with a suitable store and tells them when there is surplus food to collect. It is now being rolled out to larger Tesco stores with the aim of being in over 1000 stores by year-end.
The app can be integrated with the user’s own product, pricing and waste services data, and uses barcode scanners on mobile devices to scan existing product data. At the point of scanning, the retail user indicates if the item can be donated, or is excluded.
Donations are then posted onto the system and once accepted by FoodCloud for distribution, the Food Surplus Application builds virtual baskets into which the stores scan each product to record a complete audit trail of which items have been donated and to whom, including weight, quantity, and price. This data is passed back to FoodCloud, enabling the retailer to mark the product as ‘waste.’
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.