Food waste has received global attention as a major sustainability challenge, with significant implications for the economy, society and the environment. At the same time, it represents a global paradox: whilst a large amount of the food produced each year is wasted, there are huge numbers of people suffering from hunger.
SavingFood offers a novel approach to tackle food waste, by turning this environmental issue into an innovative solution to reduce food waste and fight hunger through the redistribution of surplus food to welfare organisations that support people in need. Moving forward from existing food redistribution channels, SavingFood seeks to create a social movement for reducing food waste, by engaging all actors of the food waste cycle to become part of the solution. The innovative food redistribution operational model is based on an online networked community of actors from various environments: citizens, farmers, big food companies, small retail shops, civil society organisations, social activists etc., that are strongly encouraged and motivated to take collective action, either through directly helping to save surplus food or participating in grassroots campaigning to tackle the root cause of food waste.
SavingFood offers an innovative solution to food waste, by engaging all stakeholders at all levels. It brings together the food waste community and the technical and scientific community in a mutually beneficial context to provide a complete, sustainable and flexible platform where all participants – food donors, beneficiaries, policy-makers and society at large – can engage, discuss and deliver within a pro-social environment in which everyone’s needs are met, information is shared and food is effectively distributed.
Leveraging on the collaborative power of social networks, on crowdsourcing applications and open data sources SavingFood fosters the creation and sharing of knowledge that can activate the collective intelligence of people and lead to highly cooperative behaviours and enhanced lifestyles.
Objective 1: To develop a bottom up solution for reducing food waste and fighting hunger by harnessing the collaborative powers of ICT networks.
Objective 2: To go beyond food redistribution to improve awareness and engagement across multiple stakeholders.
Objective 3: To create a novel and more effective operational model for food redistribution that will dramatically increase current levels of engagement.
Objective 4: To drive and sustain behaviour change towards food waste reduction on personal and collective levels.
Objective 5: To gain a better understanding on the processes of collective awareness, collective intelligence and online behaviours and networks
Objective 6: To enable adoption of SavingFood so as to offer a Europe-wide social innovation solution towards food waste.
