Page 24 - Food&Drink Business magazine June 2022

FOOD WASTE
A tech flex for zero waste
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
24 | Food&Drink business | June 2022 | www.foodanddrinkbusiness.com.au