I started GoodToEat with a simple but hard mission of helping reduce food waste. I am a supply chain meets tech professional. So, I naively looked at food wastage as a supply-demand mismatch. But as they say: the river runs deeper than that.
There's no denying that food waste is an overwhelming global issue with up to 40% of all food produced in the world ending up in a landfill. This is a concern in multiple dimensions; from environmental impact to food insecurity to lower margins for the food & beverage industry.
It is well known that the food industry operates on a margin of less than 8%. In the recent years, this industry has been further hit with exponential increase in the cost of operations. This has been largely due to rising raw materials costs, labor costs and technology costs. When a food vendor has to throw away good food, it isn't just the loss of revenue. It is also the loss of production and inventory costs as well as labor and logistics costs. On top of this, food vendors have to pay third party recycling companies for waste management.
If waste is indeed excess food, why prepare excess in the first place?
In the recent years, food vendors have adopted technology such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, Toast, ChowNow etc to help with additional sales at a hefty fees of 25% to 30%. Restaurants and other food vendors are hesitant to pass on this cost to customers as they tend to be price sensitive. So they overproduce and hope that economies of scale would aide them eventually. But more often than not, the excess simply ends up as waste.
Given this scenario, what actions can be taken to help reduce waste while improving margins. Drop in your comments below.