Success already reached

Foodsharing as we know it today started in Germany in 2012, when the platform foodsharing.de, where people could offer and receive food from each other, and the platform organizing regular pick-ups from cooperating stores, called lebensmittelretten.de (lebensmittelretten meaning foodsaving), joined forces and merged in the new multifunctional web application carrying forth the name of foodsharing.de.

Since then, the foodsaving and -sharing movement grew exponentially, so that in May 2016 already 4 million kilograms of food had been saved by then 16,000 foodsavers and in April 2017 the numbers almost doubled to 8 million kilograms of saved food and 25,000 foodsavers. These figures, however, only count the achievements of foodsavers in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The newer initiatives e.g. in Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Warsaw, Nantes, Gothenburg, Taizhong or Bilbao do not even play into these statistics, as the foodsharing.de platform that automatically creates them is only available in German so far.

The international development is now pursued by the yunity network, which has been born from the wish to extend and expand the foodsharing idea - be it locally or philosophically. A new website called karrot.world has been created - and is still improved constantly - to support international initiatives, that carry out foodsaving and -sharing in the same uncommercial, self-determined and voluntary way as it started in Germany.

Now there are already numerous of these foodsaving projects and foodsharing communities out there, working together to fight food waste in the very practical way of making use of imperfect products and produce before it can be thrown away. They cooperate with stores, restaurants, canteens, cafes, farmer's markets, hotels, bars and even events like music festivals, fairs or christmas markets.

What makes cooperations with foodsharing special is, that the foodsavers - being exellently connected, motivated and self-organized private persons - can react extremely fast to save and distribute even huge amounts of food, if need be. In case of a system failure at a cooling house, wrongly delivered goods or simply an accident that leads to a whole pallet's worth of food being damaged, foodsharing can come over and save the day - or in this case: the food.

The distribution of the goods then takes place via online channels, public fridges and shelves (also maintained by the foodsavers) or pop-up foodsharing events. Since all the foodsavers are driven by the love for food and the will to save it from being wasted, they often come up with unusual and creative ideas and they always make sure that possibly every single bite of the saved food will be eaten by humans.