At Simply Doughnuts, we have always made the case that long shelf-lives yield distinct commercial advantages for retailers. This week, a new waste benchmarking exercise has proved it.

By giving retailers more time to sell before our products expire, we enable our customers to make dramatic reductions in pre-consumer food waste. That, in turn, means lower waste costs, fewer ‘reduced to clear’ offers, and improved profits.

That has always been our contention and key to our market appeal. Recently, however, we set out to quantify those benefits by carrying out a data-driven benchmarking exercise. By compiling retailer feedback from over the last three years, we’ve been able to compare the waste scores achieved by our doughnuts against the average scores achieved by the category as a whole. The results, we think, are both revealing and impressive.

In July 2025, WRAP published an update to its “UK Food Waste & Food Surplus – Key Facts” report. In section 4.2, it lists the proportions of waste by food group and notes that for bakery goods, the score is 11% by weight.

This is broadly consistent with the feedback we’ve had from retailers, who say that average waste in retail bakery departments can reach up to 12% by weight. And even the best-performing retailers struggle to keep bakery waste scores below 2% due to short shelf-lives and perishability. For the doughnuts category in particular, waste scores can average between 20% and 21%.

By contrast, our own pre-consumer waste scores, as reported back to us by retailers, have remained well below 1%. Since the start of the year, retailer feedback indicates an average of 0.61%. Our three-year average is just under 0.4%.

We can drill further into those figures. But first, we should note that not all pre-consumer food waste results from products expiring on the shelf. Sometimes, products must be discarded because, for example, their packaging has been damaged in transit or in-store. If we remove those causes from the waste scores for Simply Doughnuts, we see the following averages for 2023 to 2025. These are the scores that are directly affected by shelf-lives.

• Product reaching expiry: 0.25%
• Product approaching expiry, sold via ‘reduced to clear offers: 0.13%
• Total waste associated with expiry / shelf-life: 0.38%

As a reminder, these compare with an industry waste average of 21% for the doughnuts category in particular.

In summary, then, the latest figures show that:

• Our total waste scores are more than three times better than the top benchmark figure of 2%.
• They are more than 18 times better than the industry average for baked goods as a whole.
• They are over 30 times better than the category average for fresh doughnuts.

Given the pressure that retailers are facing to reduce costs, maintain margins and make progress towards net zero and UN Sustainable Development Goals*, choosing longer shelf-life products clearly makes sense.

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* Note: UN Sustainable Development Goal 12.3.1b has the stated aim of halving per capita food waste at the retail and consumer levels by 2030, and reducing food losses along production and supply chains.