by Food Trade News Team
‘This week our team has been investigating “the next big thing” in Grocery at the National Retail Federation (NRF) “Retail’s Big Show 2026” in New York City. A whopping 40,000+ participants and organizations from around the world.:
Can tech solve food waste and end hunger? Nearly ⅓ of all food produced in the U.S. is thrown away. Roughly 74 million tons of surplus food goes unsold or uneaten. These are staggering numbers when you consider the issue of hunger in America.
From the most recent 2023 data; Over 47 million people live in households which are classified as ‘food insecure’, with over 7 million of them being children. That means that almost one in seven Americans struggle with hunger in one of the most prosperous countries in the world.
One of the more interesting discussions we sat in on at NRF was concerning the use case for RFID to solve the issue of food waste. A panel with Julie Varga, VP/GM, Enterprise Intelligent Labels at Avery Dennison and Jonathan Olsen, Sr. Director In Stock & Innovation at The Kroger Co. shed some light on this issue.
The known issues with food waste in stores is a mix between the need to overstock for displays featuring abundant fresh products and the operational inefficiencies like spoilage, damage and inventory management.
[Studies consistently show that shoppers buy more produce from filled shelves with the illusion of abundance. On these higher margin perishables, stores would rather overstock than lose a sale. Food waste from reasons such as spoilage and overstocking is a big problem.]
Julie Varga opened with “The food waste issue is a $540 billion value opportunity hiding in plain sight for retailers in grocery.” The potential savings are significant as she added that “The cost of this waste is 33% of revenue. Moreover, 61% [of retailers] do not have the visibility to see their food waste across their supply chain.”
Kroger’s food waste initiative “Zero Hunger | Zero Waste” has a goal of achieving zero operational waste (90%+) and 95% food waste diversion in stores by 2025. At current they report 85% of total food waste diversion.
Jonathan Olsen shared, “We have a real responsibility to minimize waste across the system, and make sure the right products are at our stores. The ability to do so is based on inventory accuracy. We are leaning in on RFID and solving the gap.”
Kroger began its RFID focus on the produce department as they reported that “It’s one of the higher challenges and highest customer impact basis.” Their process was to focus less on the tech at first, and more on whether it fit within the associates work-flow for ease of integration.
The technology is still evolving – but it’s happening quickly. It forced early adopters to test their pre-conceptions on tagging at the store and upstream. The process has realigned packaging processes and use cases, but there are still the issues of figuring out how to reduce false positives.
RFID technology has improved so that older issues related to movement or water aren’t a problem. It should be noted that Avery Dennison was showcasing their advancements in bakery and meat RFID tags at their booth.
Jonathan explained how Kroger is using RFID in their bakery department. “Bakers are busy and everyone is focused on the next task. There’s a multitude of activities and tasks they are doing. Getting a starting inventory count, that can be done in minutes instead of hours, affects starting activities and saves hours a day.”
He added the point that “You can’t fix what you can’t see. We’re all shoppers looking for the freshest products, we want our product to last.”
Today consumers want more information on what they are buying. With RFID technologies retailers are being given the tools that help deliver on these promises and the data shoppers want.
Food waste as being a ‘cost of business’ is going to go away with the advent of agentic ai and technology to understand the supply chain – and act on them across the supply chain.
Some of the final thoughts and takeaways from the session were that RFID tags and their technology are still improving year-over-year. The data that they track will be captured and sorted better. It will expose solvable pain points and drive a better outcome for customers.
The result of all of this, will be a significant reduction in food waste – Keeping food out of landfills and more freshness in our products.
To get more about RFID technology, you can read our other article on it here: Grocery RFID: A Question of When, Not If.
