The move marks the latest phase of a project – outlined in a new ECR UK waste prevention guide - to reduce waste in Asda’s chilled supply chain.
“A review of purchase order cut-off times for suppliers and allocation cut-off times for depots has identified further opportunities for code life improvements,” adds the retailer.
“This is currently under review for trial in 2011.”
The first phase of the project, which encountered some resistance from suppliers, was completed in April, helped Asda to increase its retained life on more than 160 products by an average of 28%.
This in turn generated an additional 1,000 days of code life to shoppers, reveals the ECR guide.
Retained shelf-life review
“Asda had not formally reviewed the level of retained life of its chilled products for a number of years. As part of an initiative to reduce waste and give stores a longer period to sell products and consumers longer to consume them, a review of the retained life of products was conducted.
“Through technological and packaging changes, the intrinsic life of some fresh products had increased since they had been introduced to our range. But the retained life information had not increased in line with this.”
Suppliers were informed of Asda’s objectives in a half-day conference in February and asked to “review the retained life they delivered to Asda compared with their standard retained life and highlight where any discrepancies existed”.
Suppliers were then given access to Asda data to allow them to compare its view of retained life versus their recommended options.
“The feedback then allowed all the Asda systems to be reset to increase the code life to Asda and the consumer.”
Supplier buy-in
The biggest challenge was supplier buy-in, however, admitted Asda. “Some vendors saw this initiative as a threat to their operational processes.
“[But] Asda spent a lot of time explaining that this was voluntary and was in effect giving the customer ‘free life’ on the product and would help reduce the ultimate cost of the end-to-end supply chain.”
It had been difficult to determine the impact of the initiative on waste “due to the enhanced underlying performance”, said the firm, “but anecdotal evidence is strong that the products affected have seen a reduction in waste”.