Food waste is a systemic problem that we have grown accustomed to. Yume founder and CEO Katy Barfield explains how the social enterprise is tackling the problem at its core.
Excess and ageing food products are to the supply chain what distant relatives are to a wedding. They have to be there, but no one really has time for them. Funnelled through fragmented clearance channels or offered on the fly to charity, sadly, surplus stock can end up as animal feed or slip through the cracks to landfill more often than any of us would like.
We have all got used to this dysfunction. Leaks in the supply chain have long been an unfortunate, but accepted, reality of doing business. But this reality is making up 42 per cent of Australia’s annual food waste; 3.2 million tonnes of food from the commercial sector never makes it to supermarket shelves, let alone the homes of the people it was made for.
The fix is simpler and more profitable than you might think. The end-to-end management of excess and ageing stock doesn’t require team members to be distracted from their core focus, instead technology can help ease the load.
I founded Yume, a purpose-led tech start-up, to help manufacturers sell their surplus food. A few years into my journey I realised that this excess stock wasn’t an every-now-and-then occurrence that needed an occasional fix but was in fact a daily headache.
We turned to the industry to get a better understanding of the problem, wanting to hear more about the operations behind excess and ageing stock. If clearance and donation processes were already in place, shouldn’t they act as a safeguard against food waste?
With five leading manufacturers, we started to map out what the end-to-end journey of excess and ageing stock actually looked like. It was an exploration that confirmed what we had been seeing all along: one of the major culprits of commercial food waste is that clearance and donation processes are high touch and do not work.
As we sat down with each manufacturer, we heard the same pain points business to business, job role to job role. If you work in supply chain and planning, you are spending time collating ever-changing mammoth spreadsheets on at-risk stock. In sales, you’re feeling the burden of having to call clearance customers on top of your core responsibilities. While customer service teams juggle clearance and donation orders, the clock on product getting closer to becoming scrap, ticks.
Understanding this ticking clock, the short window of time where ageing and excess stock is either valuable for clearance buyers, or still fresh for food rescue organisations, has been key to informing how Yume technology operates.
By transforming the systems in and around this window, through automation and digitised workflows, the people who are lumped with clearance and donation are freed up to get back to their main responsibilities and most importantly, food can get to where it belongs much faster.
The technology operates by stepping in as a one stop solution for the end-to-end management of this food. Connecting stock to buyers that are wide-ranging and diverse, the Yume buyer network includes everyone from discount retailers to industrial caterers, other food manufacturers, airline lounges or community groups.
This diversity in buyers is integral to ensuring food never reaches a dead end. Yume takes this approach to donation too. If a product can’t be sold or is automatically flagged as a donation candidate (through shelf-life rules set by the manufacturer) it is offered to the manufacturer’s preferred food rescue organisation.
If it can’t be accepted, the donation waterfalls down to alternative charities until it finds a good home.
By opening as many doors as possible to sales and donation avenues, Yume technology tackles the entrenched slipping of food down the food waste hierarchy head on, rewriting the belief that food waste is just part of doing business.
Yume’s users are made up of industry leaders such as Unilever, Mars Food, and General Mills; businesses who understand that purpose-led decisions are the only way forward. Each came to us with their own unique set of challenges and business goals.
The beauty of technology is its malleability. We often describe our platform as purpose-built, and it is. But a big part of its design is its ability to flex and understand specific needs, user to user.
This is why transformation comes in many forms for Yume users. For businesses with immature or fragmented clearance processes, we have seen clearance rates improve to as high as 98 per cent.
Others, with seemingly robust processes already in place, have seen returns soar by 20 per cent compared to what they were pocketing without Yume technology. One company is fast approaching a milestone of preventing 650,000 kilograms of food from going to animal feed or landfill. The embedded environmental impact of this is saving 161 million litres of water going to waste and 2.2 million kilograms of C02 emissions.
New efficiencies have also been gained, with the steps involved in clearance processes dropping by 35 per cent.
Team members have been unshackled from working on clearance and donation entirely to focus on their core areas of the business.
In the donation space, proactive donation management and multiple donation avenues have allowed for 98 per cent of donatable food to successfully reach charities for redistribution.
Systemic change sounds scary, but the alternative is scarier. Five years ago, businesses weren’t talking about food waste like they are today. Some of the biggest manufacturers are aligning with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, signing theAustralian Food Pact, or setting their own targets to halve or achieve net zero food waste by 2030.
A purpose-driven mindset means shaking up inherently unsustainable systems and replacing them with new solutions, step by step.
Yume makes up one piece ofthis puzzle and we are determined to help shape foodsystems now, for a zero-waste future.
This article first appeared in the June edition of Food & Drink Business magazine.
