IKEA Commits To Decreasing Its Food Waste By At Least 50 Percent By...

IKEA has hundreds of stores around the world, with at least 44 different stores scattered around the US.

And at their stores they sell a lot of food, not only in their cafeteria but also with their food products that are available for purchase to bring home with you.

And the multinational group just recently announced that one of their main objectives in the next few years is to dramatically decrease their food waste by 2020.

An IKEA restaurant was first opened in one of the stores back in 1960, and since then they've gone on to sell over 11 billion meatballs over the years to its customers, along with billions of ice cream cones, hot dogs, and more. Over 2 billion meatballs are eaten at their stores every day.The company makes billions of dollars every year thanks to just food sales.

The company realized early on that many of the shoppers were leaving the store because they were hungry, so they thought that adding a restaurant into the mix would help them to solve that problem; they were right.

Sometimes people go to the store now just for the food and then they end-up buying some furniture or some other nick-knack as an impulse.

Just a couple of days ago they announced their new smart-device based initiative that is aiming to dramatically cut back on food waste for the company.

They've called it the “Food is Precious” initiative, and it'll include bringing smart scales into their restaurants to measure wasted food and its sources. With that data they think that they'll be better able to come up with an effective method to prevent more food from being thrown away.

The smart scale will be connected to a touch screen and is going to build a smart scale system to measure the food. Workers at IKEA have said that the smart scale makes them more aware of their environmental impact and therefore their food waste. They will be continually measuring their progress and reporting on the number of stores participating, as well as the weight in reduction of food, amount of money that's being saved, amount of CO2 prevented, and more.

A number of their stores have already applied the system and it's said to have already helped to reduce at least 79,200kg of waste. Thanks to this initiative, stores in Ireland and the UK have already reduced their waste by between 20 to 45 percent.