Gander

SUSTAINABILITY: CK FOODSTORES

Welsh retailer cuts food waste with Gander

App lets consumers save money on their shopping while also helping the planet.

South Wales-based CK Foodstores is rolling out Gander, an app that helps retailers sell more of their reduced-to-clear food produce, in 23 of its stores.

Gander displays reduced-to-clear food in real-time, by linking with POS technology used in stores, automatically pushing the reduced price products to the mobile app as they are stickered in-store. Any sold items are automatically removed from the app, providing an instant feed of all reductions in-store at any time.

Heulwen Brown, of CK Foodstores, said: “We know that many of our customers feel strongly about this issue and by introducing the Gander app we will encourage shoppers to purchase in a smarter, more sustainable way while also making savings.”

Households in Wales currently throw away an estimated 400,000 tonnes of food waste per year.

Ashley Osborne, Co-Founder of Gander, said: “A significant proportion of this waste is completely avoidable. For retailers reduced food can be exceedingly expensive and at a time when margins are being squeezed, this is revenue sitting on their shelves and that shoppers locally would love to buy, they just don’t know it is there.”

He added: “Generally only 5% of a retailer’s existing shoppers are shopping for reduced to clear food. Gander changes this by putting this same information in the hands of significantly more motivated shoppers which in turn will increase sales of reduced product. For a retailer, this will increase revenue otherwise lost to waste, increase footfall and reduce waste. For the shoppers it will provide them with the ability to access local bargains and save money, while allowing them to positively address the problem of food wastage. A win, win.”

● The Gander app is available for both Apple and Android platforms