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50 Million Meals Donated Through Tesco’s Food Donation Service

Tesco and TAAP created a fully integrated digital donation system connecting over 3,000 stores with 7,500 charities across the UK and Ireland.

Read the full transcript here.

Customer

Tesco

Sectors

Retail, Food Distribution, Charity Partnerships

Profile

Tesco is one of the world’s largest retailers, operating thousands of stores across the UK and Ireland. The organisation is committed to reducing food waste and ensuring surplus food is redistributed to communities in need.

Customer

Tesco

Sectors

Retail, Food Distribution, Charity Partnerships

Profile

Tesco is one of the world’s largest retailers, operating thousands of stores across the UK and Ireland. The organisation is committed to reducing food waste and ensuring surplus food is redistributed to communities in need.

Contents

50 million meals donated
to 3000+ stores
7500+
charities supported
3 days
for app build

How TAAP connected Tesco to Charities

Tesco partnered with TAAP to tackle the challenge of redistributing surplus food efficiently across its UK and Ireland network. TAAP developed and deployed a mobile app in just three days, integrating it into Tesco’s existing systems within three weeks. The platform connected thousands of stores to thousands of charities, enabling real-time coordination and recording of food donations—resulting in over 50 million meals delivered to people in need.

Real-time store-charity coordination

Rapid deployment at national scale

Transparent tracking of stock and waste data

Fully integrated digital donation platform

Business Needs

Tesco needed an efficient way to coordinate food donations from more than 3,000 stores to over 7,500 charities daily. The existing process was complex and fragmented, making it difficult to ensure safe handling, accurate reporting, and consistent waste reduction across such a large network.

The Solution

TAAP designed and delivered a custom mobile app in just three days, integrating it into Tesco’s Product, Price and Waste Services in three weeks. The solution supported scanning of Tesco’s custom and legacy barcodes, allowing seamless donation tracking and full integration with stock, financial, and waste reporting systems. More than 137,000 staff were trained to use the app, ensuring food donations met safety and compliance standards while enabling transparent, scalable redistribution to charities.

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TAAP Food Donation Solution

At TAAP, we rethink the way software works. We empower organisations to digitise processes faster, smarter, and at scale.

Let’s take a look at how Tesco partnered with TAAP to tackle food waste and support communities across the UK and Ireland.

 

Tesco, one of the world’s largest retailers, faced the challenge of coordinating food donations from thousands of stores. The goal: reduce waste and deliver meals to people in need.

 

How do you connect over 3,000 stores with more than 7,500 charities, in real time, every single day?

The app was built in 3 days and then integrated into the Tesco Product, Price and Waste Services in just 3 weeks. TAAP’s technology was able to scan Tesco’s custom barcodes, including their price embedded barcodes and 19 other legacy barcodes in operation across all 3000 stores.

Tesco then trained 137,000 staff on how to use the mobile app to donate surplus food waste within safe and legal guidelines .

 

Because of the scale of Tesco, the solution had to be fully integrated to ensure that the stock levels, waste KPIs, and financials, were being recorded.

 

The results? Over 50 million meals donated, with a run rate of 2.5 million meals every month. That’s technology making a real difference to both society and the environment.

 

Tesco’s Food Donation Service, powered by TAAP, proves how technology and collaboration can solve complex challenges. At TAAP, we deliver revolutionary digital solutions—fast, scalable, and built for impact.

Digitise faster. Reduce costs. Scale with confidence. With TAAP, the results speak for themselves. Contact us today to start your digital transformation journey.

Why TAAP?

Why TAAP?

Why would you build applications on TAAP?

The software industry promised you could digitise all your processes, become a data first organisation, embrace AI and transform into the business of the future. But is that really the full story?

It’s an exciting vision, but here’s the reality.

Just like the nuclear industry, software promises immense power and potential, but it also has a radioactive side.

Over time, software decays. It becomes harder to manage, each year its maintenance costs spiral. All software reaches a tipping point where it must be retired or completely rebuilt.

Software maintenance is its own master, touching every part of an organisation.

All of your software must be maintained all at once, reacting to Patches, updates, compatibility issues, and new vulnerabilities. You don’t control the timeline, your software does.

It consumes every available IT resource, restricts agility, and the more you digitise the worse it gets

And the cost? Maintaining software typically costs 7 to 10 times more than the initial cost of building it.

It drains your ability to innovate, to seize opportunities, to move at the speed of business and to remain competitive.

The dream of end-to-end digital transformation begins to fade. The vision becomes a fantasy. Software, once a symbol of progress, becomes a burden. Delays mount. Backlogs grow. New ideas are sidelined. Legacy software grinds your business to a halt, undermining your most critical asset: data.

It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, a workload-creation engine, creating lag, inefficiency, and operational drag.

This isn’t the future you imagined, but it’s how the software industry has operated for the last 50 to 70 years. It’s the unspoken cost of ownership, the law of diminishing returns.

There has to be a better way!

This is where TAAP steps in.

TAAP has shifted spend from maintenance to innovation, embracing an AI-centered future of evolving knowledge engineering.

Apps written to run on TAAP are free from legacy maintenance.

They can run for 10, 15, or more years, maintenance-free!

You can digitise everything and do so free from the burden of technical debt!

TAAP technologies allow you to leverage our AI-assisted designers to scope and define the solutions you require.

TAAP simplifies and accelerates the process of turning ideas into apps.

With TAAP you can build fully functional applications in seconds, not code snippets, but enterprise-grade applications with support for role-based access controls and Single Sign On right out of the box. This means you can operate at enterprise scale giving the right people permissions to access and use the apps they require.

You can now truly become a digital-first organisation.

You can have tremendous flexibility over how you can build apps and target different types of deployments, cloud, on-premise, on-device, even fully offline.

You can develop and release an unlimited number of processes and at different release cadence.

TAAP has been engineered to allow organisations to embrace software at scale across departments, for SMEs, national and global enterprise, and in multiple languages.

Our generative technologies are deterministic, allowing you to digitise any process without compromise, built how you want, bug free, with zero maintenance, whilst providing access to your source code and IP.

Engineered for frictionless scale-out via the Microsoft commercial marketplace, customers from over 170 markets can directly start building applications on TAAP with a click of a button.

Commercialised to be inclusive for consultancies, ISVs, SIs, and product companies to benefit from this technology. Creating their own IP on TAAP, licensing and protecting their margins and value within a new and modernising software industry.

With low-cost licensing, we encourage you to digitise everything, and we don’t penalize or restrict you from wanting to digitise it all

This is a tectonic shift to the way in which software can be envisioned and leveraged for the future. We are driving the next stage of evolution for the software industry, reducing the time to value and bringing quicker results, improved quality, and lower costs

It’s almost too good to be true, but that’s our vision, allowing the world to embrace software and elevating the way technology can help humanity grow and evolve. We are changing the rules of how the software industry has operated so far.

TAAP delivers the future the software industry promised, but struggled to deliver.

TAAP can help you simplify complexity, accelerate performance, and achieve results—fast.

Click the link and contact us today to start your digital transformation with TAAP!