The 2025 golden quarter was a great period for food sales in the UK and Europe. UK shoppers spent a record £19.6 billion on groceries during Christmas, with take-home grocery sales reaching a record £13.8 billion. The consumption of desserts in the five largest European countries saw a 6% growth in the 12 months leading up to Christmas 2025, and there was a 28% increase in the sale of leavened products such as panettone.
This growing demand for food offers a great opportunity for the whole food and beverage industry to make the 2026 golden quarter similarly successful. Food suppliers should take advantage of the next nine months to strengthen the weaker aspects of the supply chain from farm to fork, such as food waste.
Disconnected data islands
The cost of food waste across the global supply chain is forecast to reach £403 billion this year, according to this report. Waste in the meat sector is projected to result in £70 billion in lost output by 2026. A big factor in food waste is that the food ecosystem has many fragmented areas relying on guesswork, with 61% of businesses surveyed lacking full visibility into where food waste occurs in their operations.
Farmers, processors, logistics firms, and retailers all hold their own information, but are not necessarily sharing a single source of truth. A patchy data landscape can mean black holes in transit. For example, a warehouse manager may not be able to see a delayed shipment, or a driver may be unaware of a temperature breach. Pallets of perishable goods may be invisible between leaving the supplier and reaching the next checkpoint. This can mean costly write-offs, as well as public health risks which erode consumer confidence.
Real-life examples: Forging a digital chain of trust
So the goal is to connect any disconnected islands of data into a digital chain of asset visibility. A new generation of intelligent automation technology is now forging these digital chains of trust. Data capture technologies like RFID enable instantaneous logging of items at every stage, and sensors can monitor temperature and humidity in real-time. This creates a dynamic, living record of a product’s journey accessible in the hands of frontline workers via their mobile computers. Suddenly, every crate, pallet, and container can tell its story.
Momentum is building, with a majority of decision-makers planning to adopt RFID, computer vision, and AI within the next five years. This technology is moving to the centre of loss prevention, giving retailers new tools to predict, prevent, and respond in real time. The strength of this digital chain has been proven:
- A large European grocery chain, determined to tackle food waste, revolutionised its inventory management by putting artificial intelligence (AI) into the hands of its staff via mobile computers. Instead of a tedious manual search for expiration dates, they now have a smart assistant guiding them directly to items needing attention. Work has been made better every day with an estimated +100 million products saved from going to waste every year. The AI solution has been deployed across many European markets.
- In another example one of the world’s largest baking companies invested in a predictive forecasting AI solution to optimise its vast operations. For over 20,000 employees, the daily anxiety of ‘Did I bake too much?’ or ‘Is this the best delivery route?’ is gone. They are equipped with certainty, free to focus their skills on execution and quality, knowing the data has their back. This is intelligent automation that serves people. It achieved up to a 30% reduction in forecast errors.
From compliance to competitive edge
About two-thirds of retailers have identified loss prevention as a major concern, with 64% looking for ways to reduce shrink, waste, and loss (64%), and expand their view of product loss (37%).
57% of retailers that improved their loss prevention workflows say they reduced shrink, waste, and loss, and 24% expanded their view of product loss. This results in real-world profitability: retailers that improved loss prevention reported, on average, 1.2-percentage-point higher revenue growth over the last year compared to those that did not make meaningful improvements in this area.
So improved loss prevention such as reducing food waste can be a key objective of a successful commercial strategy, repositioning enterprises from mere compliance to competitive advantage.
A transparent, efficient, and sustainable supply chain is one of the most powerful brand assets a company can possess. Comprehensive asset visibility builds unparalleled confidence with partners and consumers.
So let’s forge a golden chain of digital trust down which data flows as freely as the goods themselves.
- Digital Supply Chain