52%
Donation Increase
Raley’s increased donations across three targeted departments by 52%
30%
Donation Increase
Raley’s increased donations across all other departments by 30%.
The Problem
When Raley’s began working with Divert in 2025, they already had a food donation program in place, but recognized that it wasn’t reaching its full potential. Missed donation opportunities were difficult to identify at scale, and there was no systematic way to drive continuous improvement across store locations.
Raley’s was looking for a partner that could help identify more opportunities to recover safe, wholesome food before products entered the waste stream.
Get the Full Case Study
Read about our solution for Raley’s and dive into the full results in this free PDF.
Our Solution
Divert’s retail business model is built around our Prevent, Provide, Power® mandate, which leverages data to prevent future waste, helps optimize donations to communities in need, and transforms non-donatable material into circularity outputs.
Divert approached this challenge not solely as a diversion vendor, but as an integrated partner that embedded directly into Raley’s operations to drive measurable improvement in donation outcomes. Divert was able to identify donation opportunities based on its diversion data, helped to operationalize in-store behavior change, and, in partnership with the Feeding America® network, assisted in moving the increased donation volumes more efficiently to people facing hunger in local communities.
By relaunching their donation program concurrently with Divert’s diversion program, Raley’s was able to drive higher employee engagement and demonstrate the interconnectedness of these programs. At the outset of its engagement with Raley’s, Divert audited bins being returned for organics processing and found that 84% of the missed donation opportunities were being driven by the produce, dairy and prepared perishable food departments.
To drive improvement and engagement across these departments at the store level, Divert bins placed in the retailer’s backrooms were leveraged as a teaching tool, providing visibility to missed donation opportunities and enabling education, training and data collection. On-site store trainings with the Divert team supported ongoing behavior change at the store level.
At the regional level, Divert’s Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tracking platform provided the insights necessary to pinpoint stores with higher-than-average diversion volumes for targeted intervention. This allowed the retailer to more efficiently operationalize their donation improvement plan.
The Results
Within the first year of partnership, the integrated approach delivered measurable gains across Raley’s donation program:
- Operationalized an integrated program designed to increase donations
- 52% increase in donations across three target departments
- 30% increase in donations across all departments
- 2 million pounds of unsold items donated that would otherwise have been sent to Divert for processing
The partnership helped Raley’s recover more surplus food, strengthen community impact, and improve operational performance. Divert’s solution for Raley’s demonstrated how a vertically integrated partner can unlock insights and create measurable value that traditional hauling services may miss.
