SPAR International aims to further tackle food waste through scaling up its successful collaboration with digital platform Gander. The partnership was initially launched in Northern Ireland and has grown to a become global agreement.

The partnership will facilitate a wider roll-out across SPAR markets, strengthening the collaborative, global approach by SPAR towards food waste reduction. This partnership is another milestone in both parties’ strategy of using digital solutions to achieve a reduction in food waste within the food retail sector.

Gander offers SPAR a real-time, automated mobile platform that helps food stores sell more close-to-expiry date, discounted food products. SPAR’s partnership with Gander will play a crucial role in reducing food waste by creating greater visibility of discounted products to consumers and offering shoppers more value.

SPAR retailers will adapt Gander’s onboarding model by easily integrating it into SPAR store POS systems and can access multiple solutions such as integrated or stand-alone applications for ease of use. The Gander platform will enable retailers to automatically display to shoppers, in real-time, all reduced-to-clear food on the shelves within their local SPAR store. Participating SPAR retailers can help customers make significant savings and reduce food waste by purchasing the price-reduced products available each day. Working together, SPAR and Gander will take into account market differences during the initial adoption phase, building on the learnings available from SPAR retailers already using the system.

Speaking about the new partnership, Tobias Wasmuht CEO SPAR International said: “We are delighted to be working with Gander on a global scale and look forward to building on learnings from their collaboration with SPAR in Northern Ireland. As an international food retailer, we are committed to creating sustainable solutions for our customers as part of our goal of reducing wastage throughout the supply chain. Our food waste reduction strategy leverages technology to achieve greater efficiency at each step, thereby leading to lower levels of food waste. Working with entrepreneurial platforms such as Gander provides sustainable solutions that are important as SPAR seeks ways to reduce the environmental impact.”

Ashley Osborne, Founder of Gander says: “We’re delighted to launch this partnership with SPAR to address the immense challenge of reducing food waste. Since our launch in the EUROSPAR and SPAR stores in Northern Ireland, we have seen phenomenal results and managed to drastically minimise the levels of food waste at the end of each day. It’s also really exciting to see customers so engaged with the platform, which has led to us receiving a number of industry awards as well as performing in the top 12% of apps nationally in the UK in our first three months of launch. We really look forward to extending this benefit out to the wider SPAR network and are delighted to work with SPAR International who are exceptionally pro-active in their approach to solutions that help reduce food waste from farm to fork.”

SPAR’s partnership with Gander follows the retailer’s recent global collaboration with social impact company Too Good To Go. The joint initiative enables SPAR customers to buy food – which could otherwise be wasted – at greatly reduced cost. The Gander and Too Good To Go platforms can be combined seamlessly to provide a zero-waste solution for stores. Gander first enables stores to sell more of their reduce-to-clear product, while Too Good To Go facilitates any surplus being packed into discounted food packages, named ‘Magic Bags’.

These strategic partnerships with Gander and Too Good To Go reflect SPAR’s commitment to reducing the impact of food waste on the environment and the execution of the brand’s tiered strategy targeting this issue at all levels.

Sources: SPAR International and Gander

About SPAR International

SPAR International is the world’s largest food retail voluntary chain with over 13,300 stores worldwide and global retail sales of €37.1 billion in 2019. The 2019 International SPAR Annual Report is available here 

SPAR International unites and operates in partnership with independent retailers by working together to share global scale and expertise to enhance the competitiveness of its retail partners worldwide and build the SPAR brand internationally.