Exploring the role of social supermarkets in addressing food insecurity and food waste: a scoping review

Tackling food insecurity and food waste are two interrelated and complex policy challenges. Innovations in food retail termed ‘social supermarkets’ (SSMs) could provide a solution, utilising surplus produce from mainstream food retailers, which are then traded at reduced prices. This scoping review aimed to synthesise the peer-reviewed research literature concerning the application of SSM models internationally, with a particular focus on how they influence food insecurity and reduce food waste. Free-text keywords and index terms were combined with Boolean operators for comprehensive searches of MEDLINE, Embase, Cochrane, Web of Science, CINAHL, PsycINFO and Google Scholar. Fourteen studies were included after duplication removal, sifting and results from citation searches were added. SSMs were primarily used by low-income, food-insecure households, although some clients do not fall under these categories, instead choosing to shop at SSMs to prevent further societal food waste from unused surplus. Attitudes towards SSMs were predominantly positive (especially in comparison to food banks), largely due to the implementation of the choice model, where clients are treated as ‘customers’ rather than ‘recipients’ of food. Although SSMs play an important role in providing food assistance to the food insecure and preventing surplus food from supermarket retailers becoming food waste, they do not address the deeper underlying causes of food insecurity and food waste, namely: income inequality and the on-going creation of surplus food throughout the food supply chain. Policies are needed which address these issues directly, unlike SSMs, which paradoxically rely on these increasingly dysfunctional systems to continue trading.