Walmart – Manlin Wang – 2021

Goals

Walmart China wants to help reduce food waste and donation is one useful way. Since food is a valuable resource, using it more rationally and not contributing to waste is of great importance in reducing carbon emissions, creating more economic value, and facilitating the local community’s sustainability.

Solutions

• Deal with food waste in innovative ways.
• Innovate enterprise management methods, build more accurate prediction models, adopt more reasonable discount policies, and so on.
• Actively cooperate with charitable organizations for timely donations of food which does not meet the sales requirements but is still within the safe consumption period.
• Use comprehensive approaches to guide consumers to consume healthily and avoid over consumption.
• Develop new technologies and models to better predict the relationship between supply and demand, promote donations, and dispose of food waste in more environmentally friendly ways.

Potential Impact

Food donation can reduce food waste. For every short ton of food donation, 3.66 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent would be reduced. Currently, food donation and other efforts to reduce food waste are gradually being implemented at Walmart China, which are in line with China’s anti-food waste requirements, offset carbon emissions for the company, and promote sustainable development.