Today's program: Foodprint and foodwaste
Welcome to "nouveau monde", sort of a "nouveau genre" newsletter to better understand how to make the world better through the lens of retail. This is #25!
Let’s talk in nouveau monde this week about startups addressing food-waste and also how a company tries to address the carbon footprint of the food industry by its restaurant vertical.
Things move fast in retail and sustainability, we’re really happy to help you get the right tips and be inspired…and. wish you a great Sunday!
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Today's newsletter is 857 words, a 4-minute read.
Startups tackling the $1T food waste problem (Yes they can)
by Phil
Corporations started focusing on sustainability a while ago, and the food waste is becoming predominant.
From upcycling ingredients to extending the shelf life of produce, startups are helping the food industry reduce the cost of food waste while promoting more sustainable practices.
FoodMaven is a food distributor, bringing agility and flexibility to the big food system. It sells local and oversupplied food–lost food–to commercial kitchens, at about half price. Its zero-waste sustainability philosophy means unsold food is donated to food banks, animal feed, and composting operations, benefiting both hunger initiatives and the environment. With its Internet marketplace, big data optimization technology, and agile logistics model, FoodMaven is for profits, for people, and for the planet.
The company was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in Colorado Springs.
ToGoodToGo is a B Corp certified, social impact company fighting food waste around the world that accounts for 8-10% of all CO2e emissions. The company has developed an app which is the world's largest B2C marketplace for surplus food where restaurants, cafés, supermarkets, bakeries, canteens and wholesalers in 15 countries prevent their surplus from going to waste by connecting with our millions of users. Here's what the World Economic Forum has to say about the firm: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/03/app-leftovers-fight-food-waste-togoodtogo/
Source: CB Insights
Your foodprint (ha ha)
by Anthony
You can’t take any action if you don’t have a comprehensive view of the data involved in your business.
In the sustainability area, it’s even more relevant as a lot of people (me included !) don’t really understand what’s going on…
That’s why it’s really important for me to have great tools to help us get at least the orders of magnitude of the work we have in front of us.
It’s even much more needed in the food industry as :
- it accounts for 1/4 of all our greenhouse gas (GHG), a lot more than the transportation
- it concerns every single inhabitant in this planet
- it certainly has the most important capacity of savings
- it has a really complex supply and value chain which makes it difficult to take action
It’s therefore interesting to notice that a Swedish company has decided to get into that area with a service dedicated to restaurants (at least for the moment, we might expect them to open to food retailers later on) with an app that will help them understand the GHG they produce while prepping food for their customers.
It’s name is Klimato and it then enable restaurants owners to focus on the right matters while letting them communicate to their customers about their commitments to do better for our environment.
Klimato also produced a kind of white book : « A guide to climate action in the food industry » that i recommend you to download and read if you’re in that industry as it has a lot of good insights and also many very practical tips to help us all reduce our food carbon footprint.
It gives us common advices (yes, we all know that we should reduce our use of red meat) while offering original substitue solutions but also debunks a certain amount of myths : for exemple, local is not always the best solution regarding CO2 emissions : your local tomato may be produced under a greenhouse during the winter while it will be grown in the open in Spain. And we should all ba aware that transportation only accounts for 8% in our global food footprint…
Haven’t been able to test this one but I will keep an ye on Klimato in the future and hope that other vertical solutions will appear in the future to help us understand better our impact and help us take action !
Quick Hits
Check the United Nations foodprint program here.
Bonus track by Anthony
Nothing to do with our writing but we will soon celebrate the 30 years of Nevermind, so this is my tribute to this album of the early 90’s that changed the world…