Walmart will partner with Denali to roll out unpackaging services to help improve the food waste recycling process at more than 1,000 Walmart and Sam’s Club stores nationwide.
The unpackaging technology is designed to help Walmart associates work more efficiently, and initial tests have shown it has increased the amount of reusable organic content recovered from participating Walmart and Sam’s Club stores by more than 60 percent and reduced compactor waste by 12 percent.
Depackaging technologies and processes allow food to be separated from packaging materials such as plastic and cardboard, creating a cleaner stream of organic material that can be turned into animal feed or compost, or converted into energy in anaerobic digesters.
Unpackaging services help eliminate the manual effort of separating food from its packaging.
Walmart is one of the first retailers to take advantage of the newly introduced unpacking feature at scale.
“As a people-driven, technology-enabled retailer, Walmart is focused on driving innovation that increases operational efficiency, improves the experience for our store associates and helps reduce waste,” said RJ Zanes, vice president of facilities services at Walmart. “Denali’s depackaging technology helps us turn millions of pounds of potential food waste into useful products each year while freeing up associates to spend more time serving customers.”
Walmart has been making a big push into technology lately, especially when it comes to food waste.
The Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer recently announced it is partnering with Agritask, an agricultural supply intelligence company, on a pilot project to find technology solutions that will enable procurement managers to make more informed decisions about in-season fruit yields.
The initiative, in partnership with Walmart Global Tech’s Sparkubate program, aims to ensure supply certainty, reduce food waste and guarantee fresh produce.
Walmart also plans to open four highly automated fresh produce distribution centers and add automation technology to five existing centers.
This technology helps build pallets designed to optimize efficiency in merchandise placement at the store level and minimize damage to merchandise.
The company announced in June that it would digitize its shelf labels, a transition that is expected to take two years to complete.
