The rent seeking is so hard with this automate-the-profits bullshit.

The moment we perfect auto-taxis the service should be a public benefit and run by a nonprofit.

They removed that from their official code of conduct in 2018.

This same thing plays out at many major food banks countrywide.

Find out where the manufacturer’s warehouses and production plants actually are, and the nearest large food banks will be the recipients of their trash.

Tax write off of retail value (donated retail product), instead of tax write off of actual cost. I wouldn’t be surprised if the writeoff is net zero for them from retail value.

Amazon perishables are mostly whole foods. The UNFI cyberattack is going to cause likely hundreds of tons of spoiled product nationwide as they have no idea where to ship anything, and the production line doesn’t just stop having fresh product to process.

I don’t think restaurants are going to want hundreds of pounds of product at the very end of life in terms of freshness. This is the product the manufacturer couldn’t sell to a store for various reasons.

This is because if something goes bad from the food you give away the business will get sued for not having cold chain verification or a quality department to make sure the food was not altered in any way. Warehouses (aka ‘distribution centers’) typically have that kind of process, but retailers do not as Quality department employee salaries are typically several times what retail employees make, and often substantially higher than department managers, shift managers, and other low level retail management roles.

this has nothing to do with churches.

This is companies maximizing their tax deduction by donating at retail value instead of writing off the loss of actual cost.

The branding is one aspect, they definitely publicize the food bank donations and it’s often one of the few things food manufacturers do that sounds good. The rest is just profit and employing mass contract labor at near minimum wage.

If they threw out thousands of pounds of product it would look like a bad number if publicized… if they donate ten thousand pounds of tomatoes a couple days before they go bad they get to look like they donated ten thousand pounds of tomatoes in value, and then they get to write that off as a donation.

I’m pretty sure when they do said “donations” they get to write off the retail value, whereas if they just wrote it off as a loss to the business it would only be the actual cost.

They do this because they can write off the “donation” (e.g. garbage disposal)

All of this produce was going to go bad, they know what date it’s going bad, but they overproduce or customers cancelled orders or under ordered.

UNFI, the massive breached company, is going to have this same thing play out across the board from product wasting away in their warehouse.