Every night, across tens of thousands of supermarkets, someone makes a decision about what to do with the leftover bread, the aging meat, the fruit that won’t see another morning rush. Throw it in the skip, or hand it to a food bank? Most stores pick the skip. They probably shouldn’t. A new study from the University of Copenhagen has crunched the numbers on what surplus food actually costs retailers to handle, and the results are a bit embarrassing: in the majority of cases, discarding food is more expensive than donating it.
The finding seems counterintuitive until you see the arithmetic. Disposing of food waste in Denmark typically costs retailers somewhere between €0.27 and €0.36 per kilogram, covering collection fees, handling, and transport to composting or biogas facilities. Donation, by contrast, tends to run about €0.14 to €0.23 per kilogram, because a food redistribution organisation simply sends a vehicle round to pick it up, not unlike the biogas contractor.
Jørgen Dejgård Jensen, a professor at the department of food and resource economics at the university, has spent the past several years trying to understand why retailers so rarely plump for the cheaper option. His study, published in the Journal of Food Products Marketing, combines industry data, stakeholder interviews, and household purchase records to map the economics of surplus food across nine food categories, from fresh bread and produce to meat, seafood, and dairy. At least half of all surplus food in Danish retail ends up discarded. Somewhere between 0.1 and 0.2 percent is donated. That gap, Jensen argues, is not a values problem. It is, more often than not, a knowledge problem.
“There is a widespread perception that donating surplus food is mainly about charity,” Jensen says. “But our figures show that, in many cases, it is also the most financially sensible option for retailers once they have given up hope of selling the products.”
Mark It Down First
The study maps out a rough decision tree for supermarket managers. With days still on the shelf-life clock, the economics strongly favour price reductions rather than donation or disposal. A markdown of roughly 15 percent is typically enough to move goods that would otherwise expire. For fresh meat, fish, and processed meat, the net financial gain from discounting rather than discarding can exceed €1.3 per kilogram, a figure that probably surprises most store managers who assume markdowns are always a loss.
It is only when sale is no longer realistic, usually on or near the expiry date, that the choice between donation and disposal becomes live. And here the numbers are clear enough. “From the store’s perspective, it is often about choosing the least costly solution,” Jensen says. “In practice, there is little difference between putting food into a container for collection, for example for biogas production, and placing it on a pallet for a food redistribution organisation to collect.”
There are some exceptions. Liquid dairy products (milk, cream, that sort of thing) and dry goods like flour or oats present a trickier calculation, partly because their value per kilogram is low relative to the costs a food bank incurs collecting and refrigerating them. Donation of a single pallet of long-life milk might not pay off in isolation, though Jensen notes that marginal costs look very different if a collection vehicle is already coming anyway. For high-value categories, including meat, seafood, and cheese, the case for donation over disposal is much stronger, and the gap between the two strategies is widest for precisely those products that vulnerable recipients would find most useful. There is an awkward irony in this: the food banks most need the protein-rich donations, and those donations happen to make the best financial sense for retailers to provide.
The App Alternative
The study also flagged that platforms like Too Good to Go, which sell “goodie bags” of near-expiry food via smartphone app, can in some cases be even more profitable than donation for bread and produce, generating net revenue of up to €0.5 to €0.7 per kilogram. This alternative probably explains why donation rates are lowest in precisely the food categories where app-based redistribution is most established.
A Knowledge Problem, Not a Values Problem
Why isn’t any of this already happening? Jensen suspects the answer is partly just awareness. “Some products may be thrown away simply because staff are not aware that a better option exists,” he says. Training employees to recognise which items belong on a donation pallet rather than in the waste container, and making those logistics arrangements in the first place, requires organisational effort that many stores have not yet made. There are also institutional barriers: a store manager making decisions alone, with no relationship with a local food redistribution charity, has no obvious route to setting up a collection arrangement even if they wanted to.
The broader implication, which Jensen’s paper is careful to spell out, is that the assumed conflict between environmental responsibility and commercial logic may be largely fictitious, at least in this corner of retail. The conventional assumption has been that sustainability initiatives cost money; here is a case where the opposite might be true. If that sounds like an invitation for Danish retailers to quietly celebrate, it is also a nudge toward accountability: the data now exists, and it is hard to claim ignorance of the economics.
Bread, fruit, and vegetables account for roughly 65 percent of total surplus in Danish retail. Whether the analysis scales cleanly to other countries, with different waste-handling fees, different food bank logistics, and different platform economies, remains to be tested. But the core logic is fairly general, and Jensen seems to reckon that the Danish case is not all that exceptional.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10454446.2025.2584844
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it really cheaper for supermarkets to donate food than throw it away?
For most food categories, yes. Research from the University of Copenhagen found that disposing of surplus food typically costs retailers €0.27 to €0.36 per kilogram, while donation costs around €0.14 to €0.23 per kilogram. The main reason is that a food redistribution organisation collecting a pallet involves similar logistics to a biogas contractor picking up waste, but without the disposal fees. Exceptions include liquid dairy and dry goods, where the value per kilogram is too low relative to collection costs.
If donating is cheaper, why do so few supermarkets actually do it?
The study points to a knowledge gap rather than a values problem. Many store employees simply don’t know that donation is the more economical option, and stores that haven’t established a relationship with a local food redistribution charity have no obvious route to setting one up. Better staff training and pre-arranged collection logistics could close much of the gap without requiring any new regulation or subsidies.
What’s the best thing a supermarket can do with food that’s about to expire?
According to the Copenhagen analysis, the most profitable move is to discount it early. A price reduction of around 15 percent, applied a few days before the expiry date, is typically enough to ensure products sell rather than expire. For fresh meat, fish, and processed meat, the financial advantage of discounting over discarding can exceed €1.30 per kilogram. Only liquid dairy and dry goods rarely benefit from this strategy.
Could apps like Too Good to Go replace food bank donations?
For some product categories, the economics of app-based redistribution are actually better for retailers than donation; the study found net revenues of up to €0.50 to €0.70 per kilogram for bread and produce sold this way. But these platforms operate mainly with short-shelf-life items and don’t reach the same vulnerable populations that food banks serve. Whether expanding platform sales would displace or supplement charitable donation is an open question the study doesn’t fully resolve.
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