France Made Supermarkets Give It Away

By Warren Hamilton Category: Strange Laws 22nd June 2026

France did something I wish my local shop would: in 2016 they passed a law stopping supermarkets from chucking perfectly good food in the bin. Proper rule. You cannot just heap salads and tins into a skip and pretend it never existed.

It was the first country to do it. The idea is simple and a bit brilliant: edible surplus must be offered to charities. Supermarkets have to sign donation deals, hand food over cleanly, and they are explicitly forbidden from deliberately spoiling stock so it goes in the bin. No more spraying bleach on bread to stop scavengers nicking it. Nasty tricks are outlawed.

Now, this is not fairyland. The law targets supermarkets, not your mate with the leftover curry. But it set a tone. It made throwing away food a job you could get fined for, rather than a shrug and a wheeze. Given how much perfectly good grub ends up rotting, that seemed like common sense dressed up as law.

I like the theatre of it. Picture the manager who used to push old yoghurts into a cardboard grave being told by a civil servant, "No, mate. Give it to the food bank." He'd go pale. Proper bureaucratic hug. And people actually got a bit cleverer about stock rotation and selling things cheaper before they went off. Who knew laws could make shops marginally less lazy?

Of course it didn't solve every problem. Logistics are dull. Charities need space and volunteers, and some stuff is legitimately unsaleable. But the law stopped the dumb, wasteful bits. It nudged an industry into admitting waste was not a cost of doing business but a problem to deal with.

On a personal level, I like laws that make the sensible slightly awkward for those who'd rather not bother. It's like forcing people to be polite by law. Bit heavy-handed maybe, but if it means fewer apples in the bin and more dinners on a table, I'm all for the paperwork. France turned common decency into legislation and somehow it works. Weird, but comforting.