The Trick Walmart Uses To Extend The Shelf Life Of Foods That Are About To Expire

It's inevitable that a massive grocery chain like Walmart often isn't able to sell its entire stock. As we're all becoming aware of how excessive waste is harming the Earth's atmosphere, many are wondering how big companies are battling this problem at the very source. Walmart has many strategies for minimizing waste, but one of its best tricks is extending the shelf life of perishable foods by blast chilling and reselling them.

Blast chillers are special machines that can chill food much faster than a regular fridge or freezer — they take hot food to a temperature lower than 40 degrees Fahrenheit in 90 minutes. Because this process is so fast, it largely bypasses the so-called danger zone (40 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the temperature range where bacteria grow the fastest. This means the food is rapidly preserved in a safe way, all while retaining its quality, flavor, and texture.

So, when freshly baked rotisserie chicken doesn't get sold at Walmart in a timely manner, instead of tossing it, the store blast chills it to preserve it. This results is a longer shelf life, which means the food can be resold. For example, a freshly baked chicken only has a shelf life of four hours, but the blast-chilled chicken can stay good for three days. This significantly reduces waste, plus the concept of salvaged groceries could be an underrated answer to food inflation.

It's not always easy to find out what your local grocery store does with old produce, but Walmart is pretty transparent with its practices surrounding food waste. The items with a rapidly approaching expiration date that the company is not able to repurpose initially get listed at a discounted price. Then, the unsold edible food gets donated to local communities through food banks and similar charity organizations — Walmart donated 778 million pounds of food in 2023 alone.

Some food does expire, however, or becomes otherwise inedible and can't be donated, so what happens to that? Some of it gets recycled, and the rest gets disposed of. In concrete numbers for the year 2023, Walmart recycled 951 million pounds of food and disposed of 1,262 million pounds of food through landfill and incineration. The food that got recycled was mostly turned into animal feed (578 million pounds), followed by anaerobic digestion, composting, and biochemical processing. That said, the grocery chain is striving to reduce its food waste with every single year and has quite successfully been doing so, cutting it down by 21% from 2016 to 2023. If you're interested in how other big companies are approaching this complex issue, here's what McDonald's does with its leftover food.