From Waste to Taste
From Waste to Taste
From Waste to Taste is a project that aims at reducing the amount of food waste by founding a waste food restaurant and a food recycling centre in Helsinki. The restaurant will serve high quality food made by creative chefs mainly from ingredients that would otherwise be wasted.
The project also gives work for people under risk of social exclusion (young and long-term unemployed people as well as immigrants) and supports them in finding their way back to work life. Professional chefs will be responsible of preparing the food.
In addition, the project supplies food to organisations giving food aid.
Food waste has a big impact on climate
According to the Natural Resources Institute in Finland food waste from markets in Finland is over 65 million kilos per year. Only 10–15 % of that is given to food charity. The environmental impact is enormous because of all the resources that have gone to producing, packaging and transporting the food.
In addition to founding the restaurant and food-recycling centre, From Waste to Taste influences people's attitudes and raises awareness on how everyone can reduce the amount of food waste and thereby contribute to slowing down the climate change and minimizing food waste.
Crowdfunding campaign
From Waste to Taste project has had a crowdfunding campaign running in the Finnish “Mesenaatti.me” crowdfunding service. Individuals and companies could support the project by buying lunch/brunch/dinner passes or a founding membership from the service.
The project needed at least 20 000 euros to be realised and in the end got almost 30 000 euros. The funding will be used to organise the logistic chain, pay the first rents and make a small renovation in the restaurant.
Workplace for people in risk of social exclusion
The restaurant gives young people in risk of social exclusion, immigrants and long-term unemployed people an opportunity to get experience from restaurant work and helps to find employment. For each participant a personal development and training plan will be developed, and the aims is to find employment in either this project or elsewhere. Tasks can also be assigned according their own interests, and they may include besides courier and restaurant services also office work, such as accounting, cash management and IT tasks.
We organize also training, when necessary: hygiene passport course, CV course and language training. The work can be organized with a pair work technique, where the other party has lived longer in Finland or is a Finn. We are working together with other Finnish organisations and professionals to find the right people to join the project.
From Waste to Taste is supported by European Social Fund. ESF is funding the employment-related part of the project for two years, 2016–2017.
Collecting the food waste
The logistics of the project currently collects the food waste of ten super markets five days a week. After the route is completed, the creative chefs of the restaurant select the raw materials for the day’s menu, which after the rest of the food collected is donated to social organizations who give it to those in need. About 90 % of the food is currently donated to food aid and about 10 % goes to the restaurant.
A hybrid application
We are developing a hybrid application (for mobile and web) that enables the retailer, producer, company or an individual to indicate with one click of a button that they have food available for pick up. The courier service sends a confirmation for the pick-up time, plans the route based on the notifications and picks up the food according the schedule.
Maintaining proper cold storage chain and the food safety are our top priority. We can also accept large amounts of raw materials from farmers, for example, and manufacture canned products out of these raw materials.
W2T restaurant's creative chef designs a delicious menu based on the raw materials available. The range is supplemented, when needed, with the date labelled products bought from member stores.
Consumer education
W2T restaurant's target audience is people who are environmentally aware and want to promote social justice. Our goal is to create a new phenomenon: it is cool to eat food that would be wasted otherwise. We want to raise awareness about food waste and the environmental impact of food, and show new (or introduce old forgotten) ways to utilize raw materials more extensively and minimize food waste on a household level. For this purpose, we organize workshops for different target groups and will publish eg. a food waste guide.
The logistic personnel of the project weight the different categories of food collected from the super markets. Based on the amount of food per food category a Co2 footprint is calculated for the project and used to communicate the project results. Comparing the (negative) Co2 footprint to eg. km travelled by a car is an easy-to-understand way to communicate the environmental impacts of food and the benefits of the project.
From Waste to Taste is a not-for-profit project
From Waste to Taste is a circular economy project that aims to improve the use of natural resources and valuation of food. All the profits will be used for running and developing the restaurant and food-recycling centre. In a later phase the plan is to include food producers and a university of applied science focusing on food research and food production into the project.