Food Waste in Retailing Stores in Sweden A welfare simulation analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current food waste situation among food retailers in Sweden, to introduce the emerging practice of social entrepreneurship in attempts to utilize food waste from food retailers, and to simulate different social welfare scenarios with different alternatives . The analysis of food waste is based on the collection of food waste data from 9 ICA stores with different store size in Gothenburg from 2013 to 2014 period. Welfare models and simulations are conducted with interviews from participating ICA stores and commonly adopted proxies to project the most welfare-generating scenario for food retailers to manage food wastes. The simulation results show that using social enterprise to manage food wastes yields similar social welfare as giving away to NGOs directly. Governmental policy such as a corrective lump sum tax is not desirable according to the simulation, as there are no economic benefits of reputation gain from utilizing non-sold food; neither social benefits of reused food wastes among people in need. Findings suggest that while the social welfare is similar, social enterprise is more likely to reach various goals of reduction in food waste, and governmental regulation would be a more resource efficient option if it leads to prevention of food waste from the beginning. The paper addresses the emerging attention to food waste issue and social enterprise phenomenon using information collected from retailers and offers insight into food waste resolutions.