How Divert Pairs Data with Reverse Logistics to Tackle Grocery Waste

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-09-25 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

I walked through a grocery backroom last month. The amount of perfectly good food sitting there destined for landfill was staggering. Not because the food was bad—it just wasn't sold.

That's the mess Divert is untangling.

Here's what most people don't realize: grocery waste isn't just waste. It's an operational leak. Every unsold item represents a forecasting miss, a supply chain failure, or a demand signal nobody caught in time. The obvious response is to throw it away. The actual response—the one that makes money and sense—is to see it as data.

Divert's approach works on two levels. The first is visibility. Using RFID tracking and real-time inventory systems, they help stores understand what's actually going unsold, down to the individual product level at each location. That's harder than it sounds. Associates work multiple shifts. Manual logging of every unsold SKU creates paperwork mountains and measurement errors. But when you can see the pattern—this store overbuys bread on Wednesdays, that one never moves certain protein products—you start to move the needle on prevention itself.

The second level is the logistics.

Once prevention attempts are exhausted, the food has to go somewhere other than the bin. Divert runs what they call a reverse logistics network. Picture it: instead of bringing groceries to the store, the store sends unsold products back through the same transportation routes that delivered them. No extra trucks. No wasted trips. The food gets consolidated at a central facility, where it either gets donated or processed into renewable energy through anaerobic digestion and depackaging.

Actually, that's not quite right. Not all of it gets donated. The edible stuff does. But the inedible material—spoiled, past-code, mixed items that can't be resold—gets diverted through their processing system. That's where the logic closes the loop. The material becomes feedstock for anaerobic digesters, which produce biogas. Biogas becomes electricity. Electricity powers things.

The results speak louder than the marketing. One of Divert's partnerships moved 2.5 million pounds of unsold food and beverage products away from landfill over 15 months. That material came from seven facilities in California. Another major mid-Atlantic grocer saw a 9% reduction in unsold food across 190 stores over five years by implementing Divert's system. Not revolutionary growth, but the kind of steady improvement that compounds.

What strikes me is the combination. Data alone doesn't move food. Logistics alone doesn't prevent waste. But pair them—show a store manager exactly what's going bad and when, then give them an easy path to divert it—and something shifts. The problem moves from "what do we do with waste" to "why are we creating this waste in the first place."

The environmental win is real. The financial win is what makes it stick.

Source: "Its partnership with United States Cold Storage has led to the landfill diversion of more than 2.5 million pounds of unsold food and beverage products." — Waste Today

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