Written by Foodservice Magazine.

Food services, catering and facilities management company, Sodexo Australia, and food wholesale platform, Yume, have announced a new partnership aimed at saving tonnes of quality, surplus food.

Fueled by Sodexo’s ‘Better Tomorrow 2025’ corporate responsibility commitment, the initiative will see food and produce bought through Yume and used at Sodexo sites across the country.

As an online food wholesale marketplace, Yume’s business model aims to help reduce waste in Australia by selling surplus stock from quality HACCP-accredited suppliers, including Unilever Foods Solutions, Mondelēz and Huon.

“Globally, Sodexo serves 100 million consumers every day, so we have tremendous capacity to reduce waste by improving how we deliver our services,” says Mark Chalmers, Sodexo Australia CFO and country president.

“We’re dedicated to finding new ways to minimise our collective waste and environmental impact and partnering with Yume is a great way to do this.”

The partnership has seen, to date, Sodexo purchase 9920 kilograms of food from Yume, such as over 500 kilograms of Australian feta cheese, more than five tonnes of crushed tomatoes, and a range of poultry products including coated chicken fillets and southern style chicken portions.

In all, this equates to savings of 684,480 litres of water and 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Yume founder and food rescue veteran, Katy Barfield, is happy to see that the alliance has already had a positive impact on the environment.

She says, “Australia sends a staggering 9.5 million tonnes of food to landfill each year and the Australian Government estimates that food waste is costing the economy $20 billion per year.”

Yume was launched in 2014, and since then it has returned over $1.5 million to Australian farmers and manufacturers and has prevented 300,000 kilograms of food from going to waste.

“By working with Yume, we are well placed to achieve our Better Tomorrow 2025 commitments,” says Chalmers.

“We encourage other corporate catering and facilities management companies to get on board with Yume as we can only create a better tomorrow by taking positive actions today.”

For further information, please visit sodexo.com/home/corporate-responsibility and yumefood.com.au.