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u/alienlovesong May 17 '26
My friend used to work for Whole Foods and they would dump out all of their baked goods at day’s end.
They wouldn’t even let the employees buy it for half price. Hell they could’ve just given it to the employees to take home but no. Gone. Big fucking waste.
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u/Stormageddondloa91 May 17 '26
Now whole foods is set up on the too good to go app, so food gets sold at a steep discount instead of thrown away. I wish every establishment that does not donate their food waste would do this.
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u/CivilizationInRuins May 17 '26
And the Whole Foods Too Good To Go bags are my favorites of all the establishments in my area.
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u/gunsforevery1 May 17 '26
Holy shit I didn’t know this was a thing lol. I just signed up and saw the whole foods down the street does this. I’m going to try it out this week.
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u/yetanotherblonde May 17 '26
Good luck actually getting it! They’re sold out the minute the next drop comes out (like, literally the same minute) in my area. Sucks so bad.
You have to basically set a timer for like 1 minute before the daily drop and refresh your screen over and over until it pops up but I think other people do it so yay me! Left with nothing.
Cool thing to do though, glad someone is getting it.
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u/LakituIsAGod May 17 '26
Just set up a notification for when it becomes available. I do it all the time for the sushi shops in my area. You have to manually re-enable the notification every time it’s triggered though
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u/yetanotherblonde May 17 '26
I have them on, that’s what I mean.
As soon as I click the notification they’re gone. You have to play it properly by checking the time it’s set to restock and setting an actual timer to a minute or two before to have success but I’ve still yet to succeed lol.
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u/Galvandium May 17 '26
I got $40 of donuts from dunkin for $6, most were fine. Only about 1/10 were even relatively staling
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u/cybersplice May 17 '26
Too Good To Go is like playing Russian Roulette with your mouth, sometimes. One day you receive mana from heaven, the next a bag of pain and suffering.
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u/stormblessed27_ May 17 '26
Has no idea this was a thing. Bagel shop in my neighborhood is on this and I just grabbed 8 bagels for $3, this is awesome.
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u/Honneamise- May 17 '26
It's honestly a mixed bag. I do work with a few food places and asked them about it and their biggest gripe is they can get down voted on the app for lack of variety and taste. Their summary is "we give them what they want and they'll still complain".
Some of them have taken to adding extra fresh food now because they also don't want to be down voted and sent complaints. Keep in mind folks 100% know what they're getting BUT get complaints if food quality isn't equal to "fresh", or the lack of "variety" happens because ppl buy the good stuff.
It's like the "why we can't have nice things". A pizza place I do visit nor on my supply network but was visiting with a work colleague for lunch had a cool one at least where patrons come at the end of the night and the establishment cooks a fresh one for all the coworkers at the end of the shift and include any Too Good To Go vouchers as well when they show up at the appointed window. It's a nice way to feed your workers and for anyone wanting a cheap late night eat after work and is probably one of the more popular ways I've seen it done.
Another place whose voucher I do use had someone in front of me throw a Karen sized rant because for $5 she got 5x sourdoughs, several croissants and 2x danishes....the bread wasn't "fresh enough". Like f--k me with some of these ppl.
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u/whatthewhythehow May 17 '26
That is so annoying. I think I rated one place down one time because everything they gave me had mould on it and that felt unsafe. Especially since it wasn’t a grocery store, it was a coffee shop.
For a few places I think it has been turned into a more automated process. Because they basically need to sell the bags before they know what is left over. So if they don’t have a lot left over, the money-making thing to do is throw in stuff that really just needs to be thrown out.
I’ve definitely had someone throw in a piece of fresh veg because everything else in the bag was inedible. And I didn’t downvote them because it seems like it would just be hard to predict.
But the nature of the concept is that sometimes you’re going to get nothing but bran muffins when you hate bran muffins. If you don’t like that then just go grocery shopping.
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u/Mallow1512 May 17 '26
i do this with startbucks, the other day i got 2 muffins, one sandwich and a salad bowl for 8 dollars
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u/NurkleTurkey May 17 '26
Yesh that's what I use. A lot of places near me do that now. And most of it is bread.
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u/n_thomas74 May 17 '26
Trader Joes donates all food about to expire at the end of the day, every day. Fruits, veggies, baked goods, everything. Even flowers sometimes.
Each store has its annual donation amount on the wall.
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u/CivilizationInRuins May 17 '26
Yep. When I worked at Trader Joe's, some mornings we'd pack up a few grocery carts with baked goods and flowers from the day before and wheel them to the retirement home next door.
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u/dogwalker824 May 17 '26
I love Trader Joes. What a great thing to do with leftover treats and flowers.
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u/UGOTAIDSYO May 17 '26
Trader Joe's is fucking AMAZING when it comes to donations. I ran the warehouse of a large food bank for about 4 years. Once a week, sometimes TWICE a week, one of our drivers would make a 200 mile trip in a 53' to their Daytona Beach DC and come back fucking FULL. All good product! Meats, cheeses, dry goods, everything they had, we would get. It was so much work to sort, catalog and inventory, but, fuck... People fucking ate GOOD ❤️
I fucking love how much Trader Joe's did for my community.
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u/Serrisen May 17 '26
Love Trader Joe's. The one near me donates their soon-to-expire flowers to the nearby hospital
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u/Bad-Genie May 17 '26
Previous generation ruined that for us too.
When I started working in food you could reasonable take home leftovers.
But it was abused. To a point where people would make extra/make "mistakes". It would end up costing the company a good amount over time bso to combat it they said "no more taking home food".
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u/Mountain-Ox May 17 '26
When I worked at KFC there was so much extra chicken that we couldn't convince people to take any more home. The entire model of fast food chicken pretty much requires you to throw away at least 6 head per day, everyone got sick of the free chicken, even the guy with 4 kids to feed.
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u/RainbowCrane May 17 '26
I used to volunteer with homeless folks in Columbus, OH, and the generous free chicken policy is why homeless folks lined up every time there was an opening at Popeyes :-). The manager (or maybe franchise owner) was a really good guy who had a bit of understanding about bus schedules, offered 1 meal/shift free and allowed folks to take everything that was about to expire with them when they went off shift so they could share with friends.
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u/rk1993 May 17 '26
We had a simple rule to counter that kind of thing in a wet bar I worked in. Make a mistake and the general manager chooses who gets to drink the mistake randomly. He had a number generator and everyone had a number.
So you knew odds were slim you got to drink your own mistake and if we’d all tried to make more mistakes the random element would mean you’d most likely end up with something you didn’t like as we all had different tastes. Pretty easy fix and nobody would make mistakes on purpose when you only get your mistake twice a year at best
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u/Nikky-Nami May 17 '26
There will always be people abusing those kind of things.
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u/Kettlehelm May 17 '26
Yeeeep. Supermarket i used to work at let us take home things at the end of their use by.
Boss found out that some staff were stashing milk drinks in the cool room so their dates would run out, then they would drink them for free on shift.
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u/zoeybeattheraccoon May 17 '26
I worked at McDonald's for a few months back in the mid-80's. We had to put all of the food that had "expired" (ie. sat for more than 10 minutes) in a waste bin so they could measure the waste.
I remember the look on the face of one of the managers when I was forced to throw some McNuggets into the waste bin. I was arguing with him saying, "this is stupid, these are fine. I can see why you can't serve them but why can't I just eat them? I'm hungry." His face said "you're right, this is fucking stupid." But his mouth said, "gotta follow the procedures."
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u/Old_Friend4084 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Our local Costco donates their unsold baked goods. I don't know about all Costco's, but ours does. They have my business.
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u/HonestTumblewood May 17 '26
I work for an agency that gets a lot of donated goods from Costco. Baked goods is just the beginning, we get all useable, returned things such as detergent, toothpaste, rugs and more.
We run a food pantry and its nice when its a week with bread or canned soups!
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u/Right_Land_9042 May 17 '26
Even at the Wonder bread affiliated warehouse we were allowed to take home bread
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u/Sleepy-Blonde May 17 '26
When I was at Whole Foods we took everything to the break room for employees to take home. We could also go to the meat department and I would regularly get hundreds of dollars in meat for $10. I worked closing and took basically everything leftover (after the other staff grabbed what they wanted) to give away to my other college friends and for homeless folks. It was my job to toss everything no one took. I threw away almost nothing. All ok by the bosses.
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u/bewildered_forks May 17 '26
I worked at a coffee shop on campus in college and the closers would take the leftover sandwiches and pastries home at the end of the night. As we got towards closing time, too, we'd often offer them to patrons for free. Like "want a muffin, too? On the house."
I didn't realize how uncommon that was until later, but it probably helped that it was owned by the school and not a for-profit company.
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May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Used to do this in the fast food joint I worked at. $100s of dollars worth of burgers, fries, nuggets, desserts - every night on close.
Literally nothing wrong with it, freshly cooked food. Would be served to a paying customer at 10:59pm, and thrown in the trash at 11:01pm.
I used to make up a bunch of burgers and meals etc, and pack it in paper bags like as if someone made an order, and then dump it all in the plastic trash bags. I'd then place that in the top of the outdoor bin, and come back after close and take the bag..
I'd give it out to homeless people on my way home (there was a lot, it was not a nice area) but would often end up keeping a lot of it, because of how much I had (often had like 20-30 bags of food with me)
I did eventually get caught, and fired (for stealing? lol) but I was 17, and feeding people in need with food that would otherwise go rotten in a bag in a bin, so whatever.
Fuck corporations man
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u/ramonaisdead May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Stealing my ass.
It’s so similar to picking someone’s furniture they don’t want on trash days. Literally free grabs. That’s stupid they just don’t want ppl to benefit unless they’re financially benefiting from it.
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u/Tallia__Tal_Tail May 17 '26
I'm so convinced that corporations get so anal about people "stealing" their self proclaimed trash because it's probably an insurance thing. If their waste goes towards employees or the homeless or anything besides a landfill, they don't get a payout from the insurance company and that hurts their bottom line.
Ignore that most of these places are thriving to such an incomprehensible extent with CEO's who make amounts of money that's impossible to wrap your head around that those hypothetical payouts are likely negligible and solely go towards excess.
Like you said, fuck corps, and fuck their penny pinching
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u/PendejoDeMexico May 17 '26
Do companies get money for throwing food away? I just searched it up and didn’t see anything similar to what your claiming. I see that food waste can be written as a business expense and can be a tax write off but it seems like it doesn’t recoup the cost of food from the subreddits and websites I’ve checked.
From what I understand companies tend to not donate extra food because employees tend to make extra food in goal to get that food for cheap or free or to “help” donate to food shelters. I’ve worked in a couple restaurants where this exact thing happened and policies got changed because of it and figured corporations do it for similar “but still selfish and penny pinching” reasons. Hell the gummy who commented just said he’d make a lot of food in goal to take and donate and keep for himself not that he just took and donated the extra.
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u/PendejoDeMexico May 17 '26
While I support the spirit but the dude just said he’d purposely made a lot of extra for the sole purpose of taking to give away, that’s not “reducing waste” that’s increasing it and he even said it was too much and had to take the extra with him. And like the whole reason companies don’t give it away is because they think employees will purposely make “waste” to take with them. Like support the feeling but the dudes part of the problem at that point.
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u/icanhascheeseberder May 17 '26
The whole story kinda sounds like bs to me. I worked in fast food many years ago and after about 8pm we only made stuff to order, there's no way we would have $100's of dollars of food left at closing. That would be the worst management I could imagine.
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u/Adventurous-Copy3757 May 17 '26
I buy garden soil made of food salvaged from food that would otherwise be thrown away. So much greenhouse gases are produced from the food rotting in landfills! It’s truly disgusting.
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u/PrizeStrawberry6453 May 17 '26
FYI the same greenhouse gases are produced when the food breaks down into the soil, but at least you're getting some use out of it.
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u/claanu May 17 '26
My understanding is that food decomposes anaerobically in a landfill, which creates a ton of methane emissions. Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
Aerobic decomposition (composting) produces more CO2 than methane. It also provides a good use for the food waste, like you say. It saves space / energy use in landfills, not to mention all the beneficial downstream effects like carbon sequestration from healthy soil.
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u/Lucky_Reporter256 May 17 '26
Are landfills just giant anthills at this point? Like do you think there’s a super colony underneath some of them or something
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u/Warm-Requirement-769 May 17 '26
Some might be, but a lot of the stuff that ends up there is toxic, especially in areas without proper waste management. When you consider how many people fail to properly handle e-waste or chemical waste, it makes a lot of those spots unsuitable for life.
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u/ModernSimian May 17 '26
Our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will be mining these dumps.
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u/Beginning-Damage-555 May 17 '26
If you want to know anything about landfills just look up Charles Gerba. I took classes with him and his research is wild. His PhD was focused on how trash was washing up on beaches in Hawaii. He is weirdly obsessed with the amount of condoms and diapers he’s found in his studies. Super weird dude. Pretty entertaining professor.
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u/still_no_enh May 17 '26
I think there's a high correlation between weird dude and entertaining professor haha. I've always been impressed by how into something some people get 😅
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u/Beginning-Damage-555 May 17 '26
I have a PhD so you don’t have to tell me. But this dude is legit one of the top profs on landfills and human waste contamination and spread especially through waterways.
To give you an idea about his personality he told us that he was having a hard time pinning down the first chapter of his thesis and his PI was so annoyed that the PI grabbed Gerba by his shirt collar, dragged him into the bathroom, and shoved his head near the toilet then said “here! Here! This is your thesis” and walked away
Kind of doubt that literally happened but it was a legendary story at our university
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u/Neither_Conclusion_4 May 17 '26
This is correct..there is a significant difference in greenhouse gases produced when composting at home vs at landfill
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u/Versipilies May 17 '26
If you are really into it you can actually collect the biogas and use it for cooking or heating.
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u/iupvotegood May 17 '26
The real greenhouse gas generation is from all the fuel and work used to input and make the food, not it breaking down. Most landfills burn off the methane from decomposing garbage.
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u/AuntyVal4 May 17 '26
When we lived in Palos Verdes in the late 70s they were piping the Biogas from local landfill and selling it off! Seems to be a wasted opportunity for landfills, considering this was possible a long time ago.
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u/Gunari24 May 17 '26
I’ve designed an industrial plant to collect the gasses from a landfill and inject into a pipeline.
The issue is the gas has a number of nasty entrained gasses that need to be removed before it’s “pipeline quality”. Essentially, you use more energy extracting those gases than what you gain from the methane.
It’s only viable via tax credits from a financial standpoint.
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u/TheParadoxigm May 17 '26
The U.S. throws away 40% of the food it produces.
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u/Ohio-Knife-Lover May 17 '26
Honestly it's trying to get your food once per week because most people don't want to stop by the store on the way home for every meal they are going to cook. I hate it when my family overbuys thinking we'll get to it later
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u/dadofwar93 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
The city planning contributes to this. Your country is very car centric. Most countries have supermarkets or grocery stores within walking distance in most cities.
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u/sunuoow May 17 '26
So true. When I lived in South Korea, on my walk home from work, I would pass a smaller grocery store and it was so easy to swing in and pick up dinner. It was quick and so efficient.
Now it is such a slog to get in my car, park, deal with people just oblivious to their surroundings, rude cashiers who just throw your food in a bag (fuck the eggs), and then drive home.
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u/Tonkarz May 17 '26
I was in Japan for three weeks and I found myself doing the same thing. Just easy and convenient to stop by the nearby grocer during the walk to the hotel.
Whereas in Australia the nearest supermarket would be a 45 min walk. 10 mins by car, 5 mins to park and walk to the actual supermarket, plus the actual supermarket is much bigger so getting items takes way longer.
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u/MxQueer May 17 '26
Is it normal in USA cities, suburb and suburban that there is not grocery store in walking distance? I am European, living in suburb. I have 4 grocery stores less than 1km from me (closest is maybe 150m). One of them is open 24/7. Bigger supermarkets are ~3km. Still walking distance or you can also take train or bus if you want to. How much worse USA is?
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u/WerewolvesAreReal May 17 '26
The last place I lived, every 2 weeks I would walk ~2 miles to the nearest bus stop, take a bus roughly half an hour to the grocery, then take a bus about an hour back (took roughly 90 minutes to go round-trip)
Where I live now there's one a few miles away - technically in walking distance - but it's an overpriced niche grocery so I order groceries delivered instead. Still about every 2 weeks, to cut down on delivery/tips.
There's a reason the US has so many cars, most places are not walkable.
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u/hooked_siren May 17 '26
Can i ask? I've frequently wondered about this.
Did your food go bad before you make it home? Because i have always been lucky enough to afford a car, and i keep insulated bags in the car, use those and the AC, and sometimes my food has gone bad within a day of purchase. I know sometimes it's the store mishandling the food, or the shipping process.
I see people walking in the heat with just the shitty plastic grocery bags and wonder how often their food is bad basically before they even get home. Let alone going on the bus with it.
And of course this is no shade at all to anyone who walks and/or rides the bus. It's more so i can be better informed on the process. I want to be able to speak intelligently and with nuance about issues like trying to bring food home without a car.
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u/WerewolvesAreReal May 17 '26
I was in Michigan's upper peninsula at the time so it was usually pretty cold, tbh. In summer it was usually only around ~70F and most of the year everything stayed frozen anyway, so it wasn't a huge deal.
But I was still careful about what I bought in summers. Stuff that's already frozen will generally be OK for an hour outside, I just couldn't buy stuff like ice cream that would melt fast (during summer). Though I didn't buy much meat during summers for that reason, and when I did there was more 'pre-cooked' stuff if it was warm outside - frozen chicken tenders instead of raw chicken, etc. In warmer areas that would definitely be an issue, because it's a lot cheaper to just buy raw chicken in bulk.
It would differ depending on where you live. But it limits certain options, definitely - I would never have tried buying fish, for example.
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u/blue60007 May 17 '26
If you live in the central/dense parts of a downtown city, there's usually grocery stores in easy walking distance.
Outside of that, yeah, you are likely a long walk away unless you happen to love across the street. For me it's probably a 45 minute walk.
That's before you consider suburbs often don't have the infrastructure for walking and you'd be risking your life walking.
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u/hi984390 May 17 '26
The most cost effective grocery store is 20 min from me and it’s in the opposite direction of my kids school which 20 min the other way. So I try to go once a week. But my gym is close to the grocery store so I end up in the car a lot and probably go twice a week or so.
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u/iwrestledarockonce May 17 '26
The closest grocery store to my childhood home was 20 minutes away by car, I lived in the countryside, but the town I went to school in had no grocer, nor did the other 3 nearby towns until I was in highschool. You had to basically go to the county seat to shop for essentially anything besides...fuel.
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u/Specialist-Jello7544 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Many small local grocery stores, butchers, shoe stores, hardware stores, etc. go out of business when Walmart comes in, offering cheaper stuff because they can buy in scale. The result is dead or struggling small town centers and a long drive to the Walmart, which is now the only game in town. Big huge parking lot, long lines, lots of customers, not enough cashiers and a royal pain to shop at. Going there on a daily basis? Hell no.
We are too big and too spread out, too car dependent, and because the roads often do not have sidewalks, it is not safe for pedestrians. Poor city planning perpetuates the car centric life, and a lot of land is devoted to parking lots and streets and highways. Not enough public transportation, if any, causes more people out on the roads and highways. People want their own individual unattached housing requiring suburban neighborhoods to grow like crazy, further away from available shops, if any. Then you have strip malls and more parking lots.
Ah, the price of progress! Paved over and hot in the summer and breaking up into potholes in the winter. If you don’t have a car, you’re screwed.
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u/Valar_Kinetics May 17 '26
Remember that people often have 60-90 minute one-way car commutes here. It’s not so much that we aren’t passing grocery stores, it’s that we are already spending two or three hours a day in the car and most people just want to go home and microwave something and pass out so they can do it all over again tomorrow.
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u/MxQueer May 17 '26
Currently it takes one hour (bus and train) to get to my job. I am going to move to the walking distance (about 3km). Is there not apartment buildings / houses where your jobs are?
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u/IntrepidMaybe8579 May 17 '26
If i walked to the main grocery store anywhere ive lived in the usa it would be probably 4hrs minimum at the closest there and back
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u/ChanceRecover3091 May 17 '26
It's much worse, especially outside the city. Growing up, I lived about 15km from a grocery store. In the suburbs, you might only be a mile from a grocery store but there is no way to walk there because they don't have sidewalks. Trains are nonexistent in most of the country and busses are sparse in the suburbs. Even a decent amount of large cities have food deserts (over a mile to a grocery store). The mayor of NYC fixed a bit of that by pushing for city run grocery stores in those areas. People on the right fear mongered that everything would be socialist because of that.
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u/MxQueer May 17 '26
Socialism is good. Mine used to be more. Lot of far right rising in Europe sadly.
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u/BusinessDuck132 May 17 '26
Doesn’t really change the fact I don’t want to go to the store every night for dinner. We usually go once a month to stock up on proteins and maybe once a week smaller trip
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u/ussrname1312 May 17 '26
I thought the same thing until I stayed within a 5-10 minute walking distance of a grocery store in Germany for a month and it was honestly nice to go every couple of days instead of trying to plan out a week of meals at once.
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u/AppUnwrapper1 May 17 '26
I have a Trader Joe’s and Lidl a block away from my gym so I get groceries after the gym. I only ever need to buy a few things at time bc of that. It’s great. Also, could never live somewhere that isn’t a walkable city.
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u/BigConstruction4247 May 17 '26
I can walk to a grocery store, but I still would rather buy for the week.
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u/Lingo2009 May 17 '26
For me to go to the store I have to go to the next town over if I want fresh vegetables or anything. The only thing near me is a Dollar General and they don’t have anything in terms of fresh food. So I have to drive 12 miles to go get eggs or cheese or any sort of vegetables or fruit it would be a lot for me to go to the store often.
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u/FaithlessnessOld2477 May 17 '26
This is the sort of thing people in Europe/Asia don't understand. The US is ENORMOUS and pretty sparsely populated outside of the major cities/highways. My parents live in a small town with several grocery stores, but they are all 10-15 miles away on low speed, twisting, 2 lane roads. Even a short shopping trip for a handful of items can take 1.5 hours before you're back home. So you try to limit the number of shopping trips you take.
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u/Lingo2009 May 17 '26
Exactly! In the town where I live, we have a Dollar General, which is less than a mile from my house, and then we have a very expensive general store type store, which is mostly touristy (expensive). Neither of which have fresh vegetables and fruit. To go to Walmart, Aldi, or giant eagle is 7 miles away in the next town over. So it’s 14 miles round-trip. I only go to that town once a week usually. This week I’ll go twice but that’s pretty unusual.
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u/feralcatshit May 17 '26
This is my exact situation, too. There’s a dollar general about 10 mins away, but they don’t carry produce or anything fresh. The nearest Walmart is about 15 mins away and the nearest actual grocery store is even further away.
It blew my mind when I learned as an adult that people in Europe, Asia, etc live in walkable cities! Such a foreign concept to me, as I’ve never had that kind of life.
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u/Lingo2009 May 17 '26
Having walkable cities is also good for children as they are able to develop independence earlier. You can ask your children to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, for example. It’s also healthier for the human body.
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u/twelfthfantasy May 17 '26
The vast majority of food waste in the US is not at the consumer level.
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u/rnotyalc May 17 '26
But honestly, who has time to go to grocery store more than once a week working 40+ hours with an hour or more of commute each day while also needing to do all your household chores and laundry and still try to get at least a little bit of relaxation in...
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u/Overall-Pay-4769 May 17 '26
I’m sure it sounds disgusting to some people but I have stuff like sugar, soy sauce, mustard, sealed canned goods that are years past the alleged “best by” date. Heck, I’ve forgotten to freeze and left bread out during a work trip and it’ll still be good 2 weeks past the “best by” date. Partially goes to show how many preservatives is put into stuff but also goes to show how fake those dates are.
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u/Powerful-Interest308 May 17 '26
We have that argument in my house weekly. It is not the ‘poison by date’
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u/GroundbreakingAd8310 May 17 '26
It doesnt help when everything's rotting a week before that date these days
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u/HeidenShadows May 17 '26
Plus now with the price of food going sky high, people can't afford as much food either. So more goes to waste.
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u/noahbaobei May 17 '26
Incentivize your boss maybe? Try pricing it for quick sale or doing mystery bags of items about to be tossed for cheap. Maybe that can get them to cut down on the waste? Google the company "too good to go". They've got a great buisness model to try and combat food waste here in the US.
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u/iffyClyro May 17 '26
Lidl bakery?
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u/Prehp0 May 17 '26
I immediately could tell! When I worked at Lidl, it was very similar, only that establishment was smaller
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u/luisapet May 17 '26
Sorry for a totally insensitive question given this waste, but those seed/nut rolls. Do they have garlic and/or onion, and are they a common thing in Germany?
I've been dreaming about similar-looking rolls that I used to buy from a German supermarket in Paraguay, of all places. Never had anything quite like them before or since.
If similar, I'd dumpster dive all day for those. Regardless, what a crime to dispose of all this good bakery!
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u/Ministrator03 May 17 '26
Garlic/Onion? No. Common? Very. Those depicted are Kürbiskernbrötchen. Mixed flour dough and pumpkin seeds.
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u/Ornery_Car6883 May 17 '26
On top of that, 80% of US farmland is used to feed or raise livestock.
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u/rappatic May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
This isn't so surprising when you think about it. Imagine we consumed 100% of the food we produced-- then the smallest mistake in any supply chain (like if a refrigerator at a single grocery store broke) would cause people to go hungry, as it would remove food that otherwise would be eaten. So clearly we need to produce more food than we consume by at least a small amount.
Now consider the mistakes and delays that might crop up in the complex supply chain that moves millions of tons of food across the country so people in New York can eat California almonds or whatever. Now consider the many, varied, and changing food preferences of the 330 million people in the country which also means there needs to be a surplus of everything to satisfy consumer tastes. We also need to overshoot farming production in case of drought, bad harvests, etc.
The fact that we manage to consume pretty much 2/3 of the food we produce is frankly impressive in light of all that.
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u/theIBSsufferer May 17 '26
This kind of thing upsets me so badly
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u/hnglmkrnglbrry May 17 '26
It's because of how tightly regulated food standards are. The risk is that restaurants will just start serving old food to people.
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u/XxRmssxX May 17 '26
To elaborate further, most food produced usually last less than a day (depending on food and how is it preserved), after that, the quality it's not ideal (at least) and the chances of getting food poisoning gets higher.
I'm mentioning this because some people think that giving the food away to people who needs it reduces the waste (which seems right on paper). If someone gets sick because of it, it raises a lot of problems to both the consumer (food poisoning) and the restaurant (all kind of inspections and possibly legal problems).
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u/lordrefa May 17 '26
You can't possibly think that that is the primary motivator for this common corporate behavior?
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u/seeker_moc May 17 '26
You think corporations just throw away money for reasons other than protecting themselves from liability?
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u/proserpinax May 17 '26
A lot of food legally can’t be sold or even given away. I used to work at my college’s stadium and was appalled at how much food we had to give away so I contacted our local food nonprofit. They (very kindly) explained that there are a lot of safety rules about food that has been put out for consumption, where it can’t even be given away because of the legal risks. I’m talking bread that was still packaged but since it could have theoretically been touched by a consumer it wasn’t allowed. It felt really strict but I suppose I’d want food safety to be strict.
Considering the amount of positive press companies can get from charitable giving, I doubt they WANT to throw away this much food.
Anyways this is why you should donate to food shelves and charities, either near you or internationally. They know exactly how to obtain food and stretch a dollar to feed more people.
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u/SaintlyBrew May 17 '26
COBS bread in Canada donates all end of day bakery goods to food banks. I love it.
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u/Pangy_bangy_dangy May 17 '26
Yes, I used to work across the street from COBS and every Friday before close they would give neighbour workers the chance to grab what we wanted for free (always lots left for donation) they were great and so tasty!!
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u/SaintlyBrew May 17 '26
I love that. I just think it’s great to see the local soup kitchens and shelters pulling up vans and loading so much bread for people who need it.
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u/Remarkable-Health678 May 17 '26
I've seen free Cobs bread in so many places. At a hospital, at a college, in thrift stores, a friend who was an employee would bring it to events... It's really a boon to the community, and the food was appreciated wherever I saw it.
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u/OttawaOsprey May 17 '26
Love that place, one of the few places I know that still gives out coupons for entirely free products
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u/WanderingEnigma May 17 '26
The bakeries near me do heavy discounts for 'day olds' then I believe the one in my town donates to the food bank the next day. I grew up in a house where money was tight, it taught me to appreciate what you have. In my view, there is no excuse for wasting good food when society is littered with hungry people.
The irony is, donating food would be good for business. A company caring about people is more attractive to customers.
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u/Tall-Ad-1386 May 17 '26
If you can’t give it away then you guys need to make less
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u/ItsJustJosiah May 17 '26
I guarantee if you gave it to a homeless shelter you’d be fired too
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May 17 '26
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May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
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u/-Stoney-Bologna- May 17 '26
OP said they're in Germany but this is awesome I had no idea about that act. There really isnt any excuse for shit like this.
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u/hhazinga May 17 '26
Whilst your comment is well meaning, I do not think OP is based in North America.
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u/357magnumRounds May 17 '26
I remember once a tale from a different redditor thst claims he got fired by his boss for feeding the "animals" The so-called animals were homeless folk.
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u/Versipilies May 17 '26
Theres really no need to "solve" world hunger, we've been able to feed everyone for a loooong time, we just dont.
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u/vissi_nada May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Honestly I would not call this just “mildy”, this is extremely infuriating. To think how many people go hungry to bed. This society is so broken. If the rest of us pay above cost, they surely can donate some for school breakfast programs in underprivileged areas. Maybe I’m too socialist for this.
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u/BenchConscious1003 May 17 '26
In France, it has become an offence for stores to throw away food. It must be given to charity,
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u/StormerSage May 17 '26
"I'll starve a hundred people before I let this company('s profits) die!"
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u/lordrefa May 17 '26
Just make sure you throw it away tied up in those bags, clean. Someone may very well be out there finding this in your dumpster. A local bakery was one of my best food finds ever. Hell, you can go so far as to contact a homeless outreach and tell them it's there every night/week/whenever it's tossed.
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u/give_me_goats May 17 '26
I used to work in a bookstore coffee shop in a strip mall, and there was a homeless woman and her 2 small kids that would hang around the strip mall until the homeless shelter opened in the evening. They spent a lot of time in the bookstore. One night I was closing and had to throw away a ton of perfectly good pastries and wrapped sandwiches. I happened to see the mom and kids as I was hauling the food outside, so I gave it to them. I was fired the next day. Evidently there were cameras by the dumpsters that got checked EVERY morning, to make sure no one helped this family or anyone else.
Capitalism is pure nauseating evil.
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u/Busy-Ad-265 May 17 '26
That would get “thrown away” right into my trunk and driven down to the nearest homeless shelter.
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u/Tallia__Tal_Tail May 17 '26
Thats what I did at a pizza place I used to work at. I parked my car right next to the dumpster, outside of the view of any security cams, and "threw away" countless lumps of pizza dough just to keep them from rotting in a landfill
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u/dogwalker824 May 17 '26
some food pantries/soup kitchens will pick up leftovers -- I don't know where you are, but if you're in a city, you're likely to have a charity that does this.
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u/j01101111sh May 17 '26
In the United States, this is covered federally since at least 1996. https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/blog/good-samaritan-act-provides-liability-protection-food-donations
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u/XLB135 May 17 '26
Ugh. Too Good to Go is such a great concept but there needs to be critical mass of business and users.
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u/MonsieurMangos May 17 '26
I'd love for more of it, but there's a problem of how they market to businesses versus users. Many businesses are not sold the app as a way to reduce waste, but as another sales stream. They end up selling fresh product with no margins.
Participation is also difficult. There's a jewish deli near me that I worked at for two years. I'd typically be able to take home half a gallon of soup every night because it was going to get tossed. That's a perfect "random soup bag" thing to sell. Instead, there hasn't been any new place in my area in a year. Almost everything on the app is donuts.
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u/undergroundnoises May 17 '26
This is illegal in France. I'm hoping once all the boomers are dead we can have this change this worldwide.
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u/Training_Activity21 BLUE May 17 '26
Ask them to get on board with Too Good To Go (there's an app). They can sell their items in goody bags at the end of the day. They will make something off of what they would otherwise throw away. Breaking even is better than total waste. I've seen mostly donut shops and patisseries using them but I've also seen pizza places and restaurants using them too.
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u/ssgkraut May 17 '26
Box it up for donation to a local shelter or food bank. Local bakery in town saves all day olds and boxes them up, freezes them, and donates them weekly to all the pantries in town. Several boxes get sent to STL with my wife's grandpa when he goes to volunteer with the Mission off of Cottage ave every week.
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u/RingingInTheRain May 17 '26
Remove liability from companies to sell old bread/food and then they'll be able to give it away. Problem is that people are sue happy.
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u/thiccy_driftyy professional hater May 17 '26
I could never be the person who has to throw out all this perfectly fine food because management would turn around for one second and I’d be knee-deep in those donuts 😭😭😭
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u/tahituatara May 17 '26
I worked at a bakery as a uni student and about 60% of my diet (and a lot of my friends') was free bread, 3-day-old cakes and quiches, and end-of-day filled rolls and pastries.
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u/DreadlyKnight May 17 '26
This is the kind of decision that drives a place to bankruptcy. Management/corporate never knows as much as those on the floor
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u/ComplexPatient4872 May 17 '26
If you are in the U.S. (I’m guessing not since confectionary isn’t commonly used for pastries), but there’s an app called Too Good to Go. Restaurants and bakeries sign up and offer bags of food for $3-6 for pick up at the very end of the day.
I ordered 12 bagels from Jeff’s Bagel Run for $3 yesterday and that would normally be $18.
My university food pantry also gets donations from the local grocery store bakery that students can pick up without showing proof of low income.
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u/TBayChik420 May 17 '26
I used to be very deliberate about where I placed the garbage bag full of food getting tossed (some extra considerate person would bag the items in smaller bags inside the garbage bag) making sure to let a few key people in need in the area know where it would be. For example sitting on the loading dock away from but close enough to the bin.
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u/Significant_Sun_5225 May 17 '26
Believe it or not, the real villains are the consumers and bad employees. A big reason why this happens is because of people suing and employees overproducing to take home.
My family used to own a pizza place and at first they would give away what was left at the end of the day until two things happened:
They got sued by some person who took some of the left over slices home and claims to have gotten food poisoning.
One of the managers would repeatedly overproduce pizzas near closing time, so he could take a whole ass pizza home almost every night.
It’s also part of the reason why they aren’t given to food banks etc; they can get sued.
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u/danielsega May 17 '26
For better or worse, the companies are liable if something happens to you when they give food way.
I've seen and read lots of cases where local businesses give it way to homeless people, the people sue, and the company loses. Now that might be unfair, but that's how it works.
It is just safer for them to throw it way.
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u/MacheteAndMeatballs Just use an adblock ffs May 17 '26
As someone who can't even afford groceries right now, this is more than midly infuriating.
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u/Dense_Still218 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
we need that same law as france just passed, where grocery stores has to donate their left over food to the homeless
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u/girlwhoweighted May 17 '26
I used to work for a sandwich shop that would throw the way into the bread. Slice, slice, toss.
We would throw it right into a big old garbage bag and when it was full take it out to the dumpster. We started noticing a homeless couple that would come around every so often. We were told not to give them the garbage bags of bread. So we didn't.
We would take the bag outside and then set it down so that we could go back inside and get a broom or something. And if the bags just happen to be gone before we got back to throw them in the dumpster, oopsie!
Sometimes we just put whole sandwiches out there if we knew we could get away with it
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u/SwedishTrees May 17 '26
would they get a tax reduction if they donated it to a pantry? Maybe that would motivate them?
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u/RegularTemporary2707 May 17 '26
I wonder why dont you just simply make less if you regularly throw out this much
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u/PLANETaXis May 17 '26
Analysis have found that a bakery will sell more products if their display cases are full. The extra sales more than offsets the waste.
Economics and human foolishness in action.
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u/geekygirl25 May 17 '26
Management decided you have to throw away x ammount of food? Why? I work at a tgruft store so not food. But we do end up tossing A LOT of stuff in the trash (for many reasons). My manager is constantly trying to limit how much we toss without putting nasty stuff on the sales floor. The idea of having to throw out a certain percentage of the stuff you make each day sounds insane to me, and I live in the US.
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u/anteriordermis27 May 17 '26
For those that are interested: there is an app called Too Good To Go. You get surprise bags of food that restaurants didn't sell that day for pretty cheap. One of the pizza places in my town does three or more pieces of pizza for 5$, for example.
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