Morrisons selling cheaper ‘wonky flowers’ to help reduce waste
The supermarket chain hopes to encourage customers to be more open-minded with their floral preferences
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Your support makes all the difference.Morrisons has launched an initiative to make its flowers more affordable for customers, while also reducing waste.
The supermarket chain’s wonky flowers project will see stores across the UK selling flowers that haven’t developed properly due to dry and hot weather conditions.
Priced at £3 per bouquet rather than the usual £5, the wonky flowers will be more affordable but only marginally inferior in terms of quality and appearance, explains Drew Kirk, category director for flowers at Morrisons.
“It would be a shame to see these beautiful stems go to waste just because they’re a few centimetres too short,” he said in a statement.
“Our wonky range helps growers and farmers reduce waste and at the same time helps customers to afford to buy flowers more often.”
The first wonky bouquet to go on sale will be British Sunflowers and Stasis, which will have shorter stems than normal due to recent hot weather conditions that have stunted the flowers' growth.
The move follows the supermarket chain’s successful initiative launched in 2017 to sell wonky fruits and vegetables in a bid to reduce food waste.
The range includes a mix of products, from blueberries and onions to chillies and strawberries, that would normally have been disposed of after being deemed unfit for purchase due to aesthetic imperfections such as discolouration and misshapenness.
Several other supermarkets have taken on similar initiatives to reduce waste, such as Asda, who launched a “Beautiful on the Inside” range in January 2015, selling “ugly” produce at a 30 per cent discount alongside its conventional, more expensive fruit and veg.
Similarly, chains such as Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Tesco have all embraced the art of selling less-than-perfect produce in a bit to combat food waste.
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