Stage of Innovation: Proof of Concept (You have created something to show the innovation can work)

Problem: According to FAO, one-third of the food produced for human consumption in the world goes to waste because of the quality standards, overproduction and the lack of information about use-by and best before dates. 793 million people are malnourished in the world, while it is possible to feed those people with this amount. Furthermore, food waste contributes 8% of the total carbon emission. In the retail sector, food waste is mainly caused by inefficient inventory management, logistics operations and high-quality requirements of the food sector. Despite recent attention to food waste and climate change in the world, many companies in the food sector do not want to invest in waste management departments, even they could decrease their financial loss. Because of establishing waste management departments also include investment in technology, staff, equipment and also it means extra workload and time committed to waste management. This lack of required managerial skills of the food waste management market causes companies great financial loss each year. Even though most of their surplus is appropriate for human consumption, they end up being landfilled. However, Whole Surplus can recover this financial loss while helping the environment and society with its software and operational excellence.

Unique Selling Point: Despite the existence of various companies in the international market, there is no other company provides holistic solutions in line with Food Recovery Hierarchy such as we do. Most of the competitors focus only on one layer of hierarchy or cannot provide analytics service and a unique partner ecosystem as Whole Surplus does. Many of these competitors offers a marketplace for surplus foods, but cannot provide data analytics for reduction at source. Therefore, they cannot provide insights from operations and reports to make better procurement and production decisions for a sustainable food system. While our software decides which option is the best-fit for surplus food and matches it with the right partner in line with these calculations, other software takes over the operations manually which makes it lack a decision-making tool for the process of utilization and the best-fit partner. Lastly, we have seen another competitor that also provides surplus marketplace to both people and food businesses to rescue unused food from local stores and supermarkets at cheap prices. However, food producers and distributors are not in their customer segments. Although its present in many countries, the company is not offering holistic solutions because they only provide reselling option to edible foods at discounted prices. Therefore client food companies still need to make several Partnerships to achieve the Goal to value their inedible surplus food. Likewise, the lack of a holistic waste management approach reduces the amount of food they rescue, therefore their environmental, social and financial impact is limited