Crops of British grown cauliflower have matured early this season because of good growing conditions and a mild winter.
This has led to Tesco buying 220,000 extra cauliflowers from suppliers this month, according to category buying manager David Daniels.
“We use advanced forecasting and ordering systems, but at certain times of the year our farmers see bumper crops. Farmers, call these moments ‘crop flushes’. The result is that they’ll have too much produce,” he writes on a Tesco blog.
“We don’t want to see this extra produce go to waste, so we’ll take it all. Weekly, we sell over 400,000 cauliflowers but this month we will take a further 220,000 from our producers who have seen a peak, following a mild winter.
“Our farmers benefit from us taking their increased yield.”
Tesco is selling the cauliflower for 79 pence, down from £1.
Daniels added how buying extra produce from suppliers is a part of the retailer’s commitment to cut food waste from its operations by the end of this year. Tesco has pledged that no edible food will be wasted at all.
Last week the supermarket launched its “food waste hotline”, an online service for fruit and vegetable suppliers to pinpoint and report food waste hotspots through the supply chain.
