A woollies bakery worker has used TikTok to issue a please to customers to buy day-old bread, rather than rifling to the back of the shelves for the freshest loaves.

Many shoppers would be guilty of it, whether it’s bread, milk or other perishables: reaching right to the back to get the freshest one, with the farthest use-by date.

However, Woolworths worker Kate Murdock used her TikTok account to ask customers to stop this practice, saying people won’t be able to “taste or tell the difference” if they buy day-old bread.

In the video, which has been liked more than 16,000 times, Kate says that when customers pick the freshest loaf, it actually increases food waste and makes workers’ jobs “so much harder”.

“It’s like that for a reason so it goes in order and that we don’t waste any,” she explained.

“It usually has what we think is going to sell and we put it in the rotation that’s oldest to newest.

“The old isn’t shoved to the back. When people do this, they search for the newest one, it ends up leaving the oldest ones last.

“And a lot of the time, we end up having to throw them out, so please don’t.”

She went on to say that day-old bread wouldn’t make much difference to shoppers.

“You will not be able to taste the difference or tell the difference, I promise you,” she said.

“But it does make a hell of a lot of difference to our farmers and us.”

A Woolworths spokesperson told 7NEWS.com.au the supermarket always tried to minimise waste.

“Like any food retailer, we work hard to minimise our stock loss by ordering the right level of stock to meet customer demand,” the spokesperson said.

“This is not only the right thing to do from a food waste perspective, but also good business practice.

“From time to time, we do find ourselves with surplus food, including bread. That’s why we have food waste measures in every store to help redirect surplus bread to avoid it going into landfill.

“Excess bread is donated to a variety of charity partners such as OzHarvest, Food Bank and FareShare, along with other hunger relief agencies, farmers and commercial composters to be put to good use.

“Last year over 46,000 tonnes of surplus food was donated to hunger relief partners, farmers and commercial composters.”

Shoppers were divided, with some agreeing with Kate, while others said that while the prices were the same, they’d always grab the freshest.