Services company Sodexo has pledged to purchase 50 tonnes of food from B2B marketplace Yume over the next six months to help prevent food waste. It follows Sodexo’s purchase of around 65 tonnes of food from the platform since mid-2018.
The purchase will save around 3,450,000 litres of water and precent 100,000 kilograms of CO2 emissions.
Yume is an online marketplace companies can use to sell surplus food, and has provided Sodexo a wide range of food, including feta cheese, salmon and crushed tomatoes, which has been distributed to mining sites, a key industry of operation for Sodexo in Australia.
Another large consignment purchased by Sodexo was of Australian chicken tenderloins. Yume connected a large poultry processor to the company, which had 40 tonnes of surplus chicken cuts, including the tenderloins, as a result of processing large volumes of chicken breasts to fulfil market demands. Both the supplier and Sodexo had mutually benefited from the transaction, as well as helping to minimise food waste.
Sodexo is also the first corporate buyer to take the Yume Pledge of future food purchase, which is a declaration organisations are taking to publicly demonstrate their commitment to working closely with Yume and achieve the vision of a world without waste.
“We are proud to be the forerunners in making a pledge to reduce food waste through our partnership with Yume,” said Sodexo Australia CFO and country president Mark Chalmers.
“Globally, Sodexo serves 100 million consumers every day, so we have tremendous capacity to reduce waste by improving how we deliver our services. By making this pledge, we hope to inspire other Australian companies to join the fight against food waste.”
Yume states that it has diverted 1,264,719 kilograms of produce from landfill, saved 87.47 million litres of water and saved 2,535,502 kilograms of CO2.
In October, Kellogg’s was the first Australian manufacturer to partner with Yume to help reduce food waste from its manufacturing processes.
