What Does Sam's Club Do With All Of Its Unsold Food?

You probably already divined the fact that Walmart is the largest grocery store chain in America, and, furthermore, you know that there's a connection between Sam's Club and Walmart ... that is, the two retail giants belong to the same parent company. Sam's Club is a big deal in more ways than just its (literally) vast warehouses and its nepo connection to the Mack Daddy of U.S. food sales. Sam's Club sets itself apart, along with Walmart, by being an honest-to-goodness heavyweight in the fight against American food waste. The membership club recycles and donates much of its unsold food and has tossed its hat in the ring as a U.S. Food Loss and Waste 2030 Champion in the uphill battle to cut American food waste in half by 2030.

For over a decade, Sam's Club and Walmart have partnered with the Fight Hunger. Spark Change. campaign to raise funds for Feeding America, a chain of food banks from coast to coast. Walmart donates money for certain products sold and encourages consumers to donate to the cause at checkout. Moreover, between Sam's Club and Walmart, more than nine billion pounds of food have been donated to the hungry since 2006. And that's not the only worthy organization that the Walmart corporation has paired with. In 2023, it announced that it was teaming up with Denali, an organization that takes loose and packaged foodstuffs unfit for eating and processes them into biofuel, compost, and other useful materials. Denali estimates that it can process some 200,000 pounds of food waste per participating Walmart or Sam's Club location every year.

When customers enumerate the differences between Costco and Sam's Club, Costco often gets the lion's share of attention — and it's true that Costco holds an almost two-thirds majority of the American warehouse retail market, eclipsing not only Sam's Club but BJ's Wholesale as well (per MMCG Invest). Costco may be perceived as the default, "bougie" option, but Sam's Club is doing its own work behind the scenes to make the world a better place.

A Walmart press release laid out exactly how Denali's recycling process would work on a store level, with unpacking machines present in many locations to quickly process expired foodstuffs, helping ensure that employees don't have to waste labor hours dealing with it by hand. Called Zero Depack, the program diverts waste that was intended for the landfill and turns it into a usable, homogenous product that gets picked up by Denali associates in trucks. The beauty of this process is that, once installed, the unpacking machines sit in the back of warehouses and require little in the way of extra work.

Sam's Club is also making top-level strides towards sustainability by partnering with vendors that prevent waste in their own arenas, like The Ugly Co. line of dried fruits. In its own Members Mark products, Sam's Club has announced aims to eliminate problematic ingredients, reduce virgin plastic use, and increase its stewardship in areas such as animal welfare and renewable sourcing.