Implementing LOWINFOOD innovations: Innovative supplier/retailer agreements for bakery products

In Sweden and some other countries, bakery products are sold with take-back agreements, so that bakeries deliver bread to supermarkets and supermarkets only pay for the bread they actually sell, which means that bakeries have to collect everything that is not sold and take care of waste management. The SLU team could not find any bakery or supermarket that tried to stop doing this during the project. Therefore, they opted for a more theoretical approach and collected data on how much waste is generated by such arrangements and compared it to private label brands that do not include take-back agreements. Seeing that there is less waste in the latter, SLU assumed that if they stopped using take-back agreements they could reduce waste to the same level as private labels.