DIVERTING FOOD WASTE, FEEDING FAMILIES

About 5.8 million Canadians – including 1.4 million children – live in food-insecure households, according to Statistics Canada. At the same time, Second Harvest estimates that 58 per cent of all the food produced across the country is wasted, with close to 80 per cent of this food loss happening in businesses along the supply chain.

Beyond the social impact of food insecurity, this amount of food waste generates 56 million tonnes of methane gas, which has a significant detrimental impact on the environment.

Enter Be One to Give Inc. (B12Give), a for-profit social enterprise that has developed an app that aims to connect with over 127,000 food business operators with surplus food across Canada.

B12Give created an on-demand business-to-business app that provides retailers with the tools to eliminate 100 per cent of surplus food with a limited shelf life from their daily operations. Instead, they deliver it to agencies supporting people who are food insecure.

With current partners, B12Give has already redistributed over 24,000 pounds of food to more than 18,000 people and diverted roughly 90,000 pounds of methane gas from the atmosphere.

It’s the first app in Canada to facilitate the business-to-business redistribution of surplus food, creating a circular food economy that can easily be scaled to both national and international markets.