Aeon Stores slammed for inaction on food waste

Supermarket operator Aeon Stores has failed to come up with a credible plan to donate its discarded but still edible food to food banks, despite its pledge last year to do so, says a green group.

Friends of the Earth said its recent study on five of the city's biggest supermarket chains showed ParknShop, Wellcome and City'super were taking steps to implement measures to reduce food waste, but CR Vanguard and Aeon Stores had been slacking.

A report the group published last year showed the four largest chains discarded 87 tonnes of food daily. About one-third of it was still edible. City'super was excluded in last year's report.

"Aeon Stores has been 'researching' a plan for donating food for over a year since our report was released, but till today they have come up with nothing," said the group's environmental affairs officer, Celia Fung Sze-lai. "What's lacking isn't a plan but commitment." A check at an Aeon Stores supermarket in Kowloon revealed large quantities of food dumped in rubbish bins. They included packs of cooked noodles, fried rice, barbecue items, sushi and bottled drinks, many of which had only just reached their sell-by dates.

"The food in each bin would have been able to feed 10 impoverished people," Fung said.

Aside from Aeon Stores, CR Vanguard supermarkets, which are owned by the China Resources Group, also took a "passive approach", she said, adding that the chain carried out food donations programmes just three times in the past year.

Despite that, Fung said there were marked improvements in the past year among other supermarket chains. ParknShop, with 286 stores citywide, and Wellcome, with 270 stores, respectively donated 36 tonnes and 24 tonnes of food in the past year.