The UN's Sustainable Development Goal to halve global food waste per capita and reduce waste in production and supply chains by 2030 places significant responsibility on the grocery trade and companies like NorgesGruppen.

Every year, one-third of all food in the world is wasted, and in Norway alone, more than 450,000 tons of edible food are thrown away annually. That amounts to 84.7 kg per capita.

In 2023, the government received proposals from the Food Waste Committee on how to reduce food waste. According to the report, there is an urgent need for measures to be put in place if the goal is to be achieved by 2030.

By 2025, SPAR has set ambitious goals to reduce food waste by as much as 70 percent.

Together with Forte Digital, SPAR wanted to explore how new digital technology and smart use of data could contribute to reduced food waste, improved customer experience, and increased profitability.

Forte Digital, together with SPAR, has developed a new feature in the SPAR app that allows customers to find discounted items approaching their expiry date in various stores.

The new feature is an extension of SPAR's 'love for leftovers' project, where they wanted to explore how they could discount and expose items to customers in stores. With the new solution in the app, SPAR has now made the data from the 'love for leftovers' project digitally available to customers, showing which items are discounted, per store and per product line.

The new food waste solution covers all SPAR and EUROSPAR stores and is part of a larger strategy to reduce food waste in Kjøpmannshuset, which includes SPAR, EUROSPAR, Joker, and Nærbutikken - all chains belonging to NorgesGruppen.

Results since the service was launched on February 13, 2024, as of May 2024:

• 90,000 users of the service
• 240,000 sessions of the service
• 55 percent returning users
• 8 million NOK increased sales of discounted items, compared to figures from the same period in 2023.