Yume turns surplus hot potatoes into gold

Yume’s original goal was to find and sell the surplus food. The social enterprise, which is slashing food sales, saved nearly three million kilograms of food from wasted while returning $ 9 million to Australian businesses.

“Unfortunately, not everything on our online platform is sold, which means good food is always wasted,” Ms. Barfield said.

With the help of volunteer engineers from the Atlassian Foundation and funding from the Victorian government start-up agency LaunchVic, the platform has been revamped so that foods that don’t sell out within a certain time frame but are still within their expiration date are automatically donated to organizations such as Foodbank. , FareShare and SecondBite.

“Since we built this technology, food rescue organizations are getting more food faster and fresher and food businesses are making more money,” Ms. Barfield said.

The expanded platform is currently being tested by multinational food companies General Mills, Mars Food and Unilever before being rolled out across the industry.

“One of the unfortunate aspects of food manufacturing, and especially when we are working with the market that we have, some products don’t succeed and that means you end up with raw materials that you hate to see going to waste,” said Mars Food CEO Bill Heague.

“It’s a very manual process with little transparency,” Mr. Heague said. “The Yume program makes what has been a very troublesome problem much easier to navigate and eliminate, with better results. “

“It’s like a Woolworths Online or Coles Online equivalent for clearance products… it’s an auction-based system, so the pricing becomes very transparent. If we don’t get the price we want. .it finds its way to Foodbank or SecondBite, rather than a hole in the ground.

The first results of the Yume Identifier pilot are encouraging.

“So far, after just one week, we have been able to save 24,000 kilograms of food waste,” Heague said.

“It takes what can sometimes be a cost, in fact a [income] generator, and allows us to focus on our giving program, ”he said. Mars has pledged to deliver 25 million meals to the world by 2025 and one million meals to Australia by the end of 2021.

“I imagine that once other companies see the results of those who partnered up early, this will continue and it will only strengthen the platform,” he said.

Australia currently discards 7.3 million tonnes of food each year, 55% of which is at a commercial level.