How Unilever, Mars Food and Kellogg’s are working with Yume to reduce food waste

Katy Barfield founded Yume, a food redistribution platform designed by the industry for the industry, in 2016.Yume’s platform allows manufacturers to sell surplus food to buyers at discounted prices in an effort to reduce the 7.65 million tons of food waste generated annually. Forty-two per cent of this waste originates from food manufacturers themselves. Retail heavyweights Unilever, General Mills, Mars Food and Kellogg’s are among the brands that have come on board to help Yume build a viable solution to the food waste crisis.“The question we wanted to find answers for is, how does so much food end up being cleared or at risk of going to waste, and why?” Barfield told Inside Retail. “The desire is always to go straight to a solution, but it can be quite dangerous because it may not be fit for purpose.”Together, Yume and its retail partners have been able to uncover the size of the problem, navigate a solution and build a platform that benefits everyone.Investigating with empathy The Yume platform stocks products that manufacturers’ haven’t been able to sell and would otherwise be destined for the bin – in the industry this is referred to as clearance stock. To streamline this process, it researched the leading causes of food wastage in partnership with brands.“What we found was that clearance stock is quite low on the priority list for them because it can be sort of 2-5 per cent of the total turnover,” revealed Barfield“Understandably, these manufacturers who’ve got headwinds coming at them from every direction, they don’t prioritise it in favour of selling their full-price stock to their premium customers,” she added.While this 2-5 per cent of stock is worth a lot of money and has the potential to result in a lot of waste, most manufacturers don’t have the resources to allocate towards solving the issue.Manufacturers today are having to navigate climate challenges, logistic problems and global issues.“There’s so many compounding factors for them to face that you start to understand as you get under the hood that, rather than pointing the finger you actually can understand why these problems start to happen,” said Barfield.“And our job at Yume is to find a solution for them that is easier than throwing it in the bin,” she stated.Finding the root cause According to Barfield, Australia’s geographical location plays a large role in the industry’s waste crisis.“Because we are isolated over here, and there are certain ingredients that we have to import, it can [take] up to 12 weeks [for goods to arrive by freight], from one side of the world to the other,” explained Barfield.“By the time it arrives, maybe the forecasting is completely out, and the volume you thought you were going to sell is no longer selling, so it arrives in Australia as surplus,” she added.But delayed or ill-timed shipping routes are not the only headwinds manufacturers are up against or contributors to the waste crisis.“We do have a very limited market here with our retailers and they have certain demands, as well as the suppliers, such as minimum life on receipt – which they call in the industry, MLO,” Barfield shared. “There can also be mistakes in manufacturing. A lot of manufacturing is still operated by humans, which means humans have good days, and bad days,” she added.The final cause of clearance stock ending up on the Yume platform is delisting, when a product on promotion gets pulled and the manufacturer just has to bear the cost.After uncovering the multitude of reasons contributing to the 2-5 per cent clearance stock, Yume has been able to scale its operations and work with more manufacturer and retail brands.  “The one thing that we’re all in agreement with is that no company sets out to destroy their product that they’ve spent a fortune making,” concluded Barfield.“No company sets out to do that – it’s completely contradictory to business principles.”