IKEA will recycle food waste it its stores in Saint Petersburg (Dybenko), Nizhny Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, and Krasnodar. With special equipment, the company is able to dispose of 160 tons of waste per years. This is another step under the brand's sustainability strategy. The initiative will expand to other IKEA stores by the end of 2022.

According to the UN, one third of all food produced in the world goes to waste. It makes the problem of hunger worse, as well as negatively affects the environment: food waste contributes to climate change through methane emissions; contaminates materials that could be recycled; becomes the main cause of fires, odors in landfills and, as a result, , poor health of people living nearby. IKEA strives to generate as little of this waste as possible and recycle it.

The company’s new food waste recycling equipment by Reddonatura converts food waste into fertilizer, which is then sent to the Upper Volga Federal Agrarian Research Center and used to grow various crops.

In September 2021, IKEA equipped its stores with Food Waste Watcher, a special system that automates the process of accounting for food waste write-offs and helps reduce their amount by 50%. Employees just need to place food waste in a container and indicate its source. With the help of a video camera and scales, Food Waste Watcher recognizes the type of products being written off and their weight, records data and sends it to the company’s asset management system. Thanks to it, stores can generate various product write-off reports on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, track write-off reduction dynamics, and organize the work of food department staff more efficiently. The new equipment also simplifies further eco-related improvements in IKEA stores in Russia and abroad.

“IKEA restaurants are on the list of the largest restaurant chains in the world. At IKEA, we strive to minimize food waste by using food on time and hardly discarding it before its expiration date, adjusting portion sizes and prices if we see that certain dishes tend to remain on the plates, and discounting dishes that are still unsold by the evening. However, it does not eliminate food waste entirely. Our initiative to convert food waste into fertilizer directly in stores is one of the first on Russia’s market. It makes us closer to a waste-free and more environmentally friendly future,” said Yelena Shashlova, head of food at IKEA Russia.