With Earth Month in full swing, Wegmans is marking 10 years of its Zero Waste initiative, which launched at its Canandaigua store in 2016 and went company-wide in 2021.
The company highlighted the effort in its annual Impact Report, which it released Thursday. The report said Wegmans reached an average companywide recycling rate of almost 89% in 2025. It added that high-performing stores routinely pass the 90% mark.
The Zero Waste initiative was designed to reduce the amount of trash that the company generates through several approaches. Traditional recycling and waste reduction efforts were part of it, but food donations and composting have played increasingly large roles, too.
The report said companywide, Wegmans donated 36.8 million pounds of food in 2025.
The company also works with Piffard-based Natural Upcycling to turn food waste into other products, including renewable energy, according to the report. And at the Wegmans Organic Farm, the company works with CRDC Materials to keep hard-to-recycle materials such as seed bags, plug trays, and certain plastics out of landfills.
CRDC is a green building materials manufacturer. It takes the items from the Wegmans farm and turns them into ingredients for use in making concrete blocks.
Wegmans' Impact Report also touches on the company's economic and charitable contributions to the communities it does business in and its workplace culture.
For example, it noted that Wegmans has 114 stores in nine states, and that last year, the company contributed $96.3 million to those communities.
