Walmart comes under fire for TikTok clip showing supermarket giant ‘preparing to throw away $200,000 worth of groceries’

A shocking new video appears to show shopping carts full of fresh produce at a Walmart warehouse as workers prepare to dump the food.

The clip was posted online by a TikTok user who wrote in the caption that the total value of the food that would be thrown away was $200,000.

“There is already a slight odor starting to develop,” a worker says in the video. “Yes, there is a strong smell,” the other staff member replies. As of this writing, the video has been viewed nearly half a million times.

It is unclear when and where the clip was filmed. DailyMail.com has contacted Walmart for comment.

Many who commented on the original TikTok post speculated that the video was filmed in a store that had lost power due to hot weather, and that the staff had no choice but to throw away the food as it was about to take off. lose.

Others pointed out how inconceivable it was that the retail giant would simply throw away so much food when an estimated 34 million people in the US are food insecure, meaning they don’t know where their next meal is coming from, according to Feeding America.

The video comes as Walmart begins closing stores across the country and is also reporting a spike in store robberies. DailyMail.com has contacted Walmart for comment on this story.

In the clip, a store worker says the product is starting to “smell” as he spears what appears to be a piece of steak.

TO similar video was published in November 2022 showing carts full of food lined up at a Walmart store in South Carolina apparently ready to be thrown away.

while a reddit post it apparently showed a dump truck dumping hundreds of pounds of fruits and vegetables into a landfill. In 2016, a CBC feature in Canada showed photos and videos of dozens of trash cans outside Walmart stores filled to the brim with food.

The USDA estimates that one-third of all food is not eaten in the US.

The person who posted that video said they contacted Walmart about the waste and were told the company has a policy of not donating food.

According to a section on the Walmart company website He said his policy is to sell food that is near its expiration date at a reduced price “through discount food products.”

In 2022, Walmart said it sold “more than 190 million units of food” through food discount programs.

Unpurchased food is then given to food banks or other charities, Walmart says. The giant donated nearly 700 million pounds of food to the US in 2022.

A similar video surfaced in 2022, showing shopping carts full of food being thrown away.

Many were horrified by the apparent waste, while Walmart says on its website that the company donates or recycles all unsold food.

The video comes as Walmart begins closing stores across the country and is also reporting a spike in store robberies.

Food that goes bad is sent to be turned into animal feed, compost or energy, the company statement says.

Stores in Argentina, China, Chile, Japan, South Africa, the UK and the US “send a portion of their food waste to anaerobic digestion plants, which break down the food into gases that can be used as fuel and fertilizer.” “.

The company said it hopes to have zero percent waste by 2025.

Experts say that growing awareness of food waste and its incredible cost, both in dollars and in environmental impact, has led to an increase in efforts to mitigate it. US food waste startups raked in $4.8 billion in 2021, 30 percent more than they raked in in 2020, according to ReFed, a group that studies food waste.

“This has suddenly become a huge interest,” said Elizabeth Mitchum, director of the Center for Postharvest Technology at the University of California, Davis, who has worked in the field for three decades.

“Even companies that have been around for a while are now talking about what they do through that lens.”

In 2019, about 35 percent of the 229 million tons of food available in the US, worth about $418 billion, went unsold or consumed, according to ReFed.

Food waste is the largest category of material that lands in municipal landfills, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency, which notes that rotting food releases methane, a problematic greenhouse gas.

ReFed estimates that 500,000 pounds of food could be diverted from landfills annually with high-tech packaging.

Among the products in development is a sensor from Stockholm-based Innoscentia that can determine whether meat is safe based on the buildup of microbes on its packaging.

And Ryp Labs, based in the US and Belgium, is working on a label for produce that would release a vapor to delay ripening.

Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain, ended its multi-year partnership with Goleta, Calif.-based Apeel Sciences this year because it found consumers were unwilling to pay more for products brushed or sprayed with the edible coating. by Apeel to keep moisture in and oxygen out. thus extending the time that the product stays fresh.