Most of it is wasted by consumers. But a significant share, millions of tonnes, never even reaches a household. It's destroyed at the manufacturer or the warehouse, because of over-production, slow-moving SKUs, or shrinking best-before windows. PriceMart exists to catch as much of that as we can, and route it to retailers who'll actually sell it.
If you've ever sat in a manufacturer's office and watched a perfectly good pallet of chocolate bars get marked for destruction, you understand the problem in five seconds. The product is fine. The packaging is fine. The brand is intact. The reason it's being thrown away is that the manufacturer's normal sales channels, supermarkets, have rejected it on a date threshold, and there's no internal team set up to find an alternative home for it before that threshold passes.
We are that team. For a network of brands across Europe.
For every shipment we buy and redistribute, we capture three things:
On request, we report these figures back to manufacturers so they can include diverted-from-waste tonnage in their ESG and CSR reporting. For retailers, the same figures support sustainability claims at shelf.
The European Union's Farm to Fork Strategy sets a target of halving per-capita food waste at retail and consumer levels by 2030, and reducing food losses along production and supply chains. National regulations are tightening, France's Loi Garot, Spain's anti-waste legislation, similar pieces in Italy and the Nordics, all push manufacturers and retailers towards redistribution before destruction.
We sit squarely inside that policy direction. Working with PriceMart is one of the simpler ways for a manufacturer to comply, and for a retailer to source compliantly.
We are a commercial business, not a charity. We make a margin on what we redistribute, and we have to, otherwise the logistics, warehousing, and risk of close-to-BBD trading don't add up. We are open about that. The reason the model works is that everyone in the chain, manufacturer, us, retailer, consumer, captures some of the value that would otherwise have been written off.
We do partner with food banks and social retailers on suitable stock, with preferential pricing. If you operate a food rescue network and want to talk to us about pipeline, please get in touch.