Which store to approach?

Every business that handles food can be approached and asked for a cooperation. Be it a supermarket, a restaurant, a canteen, stands at farmer’s markets, a farm, a food wholesale, a street food stand or whatever you can think of or find in your area. It is useful though, to answer some questions before choosing a business:

• Is the location reachable for enough foodsavers?

• Will the amounts of food that can be saved from this store be eaten? (Only contact wholesales if you are able to handle huge quantities!)

• Will the kind of food that can be saved from this store be eaten? (For example, don’t save meat if you are only surrounded by strict vegans.)

Also, some criteria classify businesses as more likely to cooperate. Stores that

• sell organic food should be open to environmentalist topics.

• are run by their proprietor have complete freedom to decide.

• employ nice people are easier to communicate with.

Like always, these are just vague guidelines to give you some kind of orientation in case you have no idea where to start. If you already have a store in mind, and it happens to not fit the above-mentioned categories, no worries - just go ahead!

How to initiate the contact?

Always try to talk in person to the person in charge. The key to success is confidence: You have a very good reason to ask for cooperation! Just be prepared and then you can convey it! It is useful to bring some printed background information on food waste in general and positive press regarding already existing cooperations. It also can be a good idea to first call the store and set a date for the meeting since it can make you appear more professional, but this  - as always - depends on the store and the general circumstances: Is it rather bourgeois and puts emphasis on being professional and organized? Then adapt to this setting and be as organized and professional as you can, to please the manager and staff! Is it more relaxed and wants to be seen as chill and cool? Then be chill and cool yourself and they’ll like you!

What to bring:

• Confidence!

• Knowledge about the topic of food waste

• Printout of ‘Benefits for cooperating Stores’

• Printout of ‘Background information’

• Additional info material concerning your initiative

How to convince the store to participate?

As a general tip: Just assume that nobody wants to senselessly waste perfectly fine food, because it mostly is true! Throwing away goods in totally acceptable state hurts the people who have to do it, so the employees are on your side most of the time anyways. For the higher-ups, who maybe don’t need to face the direct act of wasting, you can always take the detour to talk about money. Every ingredient and product that gets thrown away costs the business money, so why just waste it? On top of that, disposal of garbage is expensive, too! If the store decides to cooperate with you, they can even save money, because you take away a good part of what would have been waste before. Also, if the store wants you to, you can tell everyone that they participate and how amazing this is! That this progressive business understands its role in modern society and doesn’t shy away from taking responsibility to help stop the waste (or something like that…). On the other hand, if they want you to keep quiet about the cooperation you should definitely promise them to and actually abide to that agreement, of course!

All the great benefits for cooperating stores are collected on one page for you to learn by heart, print out and hand to the store manager. You'll find it further down!

How to maintain the cooperation?

You got a store to cooperate, congratulations! Now you already know the people you are working with and therefore also know how to handle them, right? Just be nice, reliable and do what you told them you would, so that they keep liking you and your initiative.

To make sure every pick-up gets carried out as planned you need to properly organize your foodsaving group, send enough people to take everything offered in one go and be able to substitute short-term pick-up cancellations.

Tasks to fulfill:

• Make sure every agreed-on pick-up gets carried out

• Make sure every foodsaver knows how to behave at the store

Ways to succeed:

• Have a clear list of who picks up when

• Have good communication in the whole team

• Maybe choose one or more so-called Store Coordinators to keep the overview

• Maybe set behavioral standards like the ones in ‘Professionalism for foodsavers’

• Let new foodsavers accompany experienced ones in the beginning

Printable documents

Here (in our Media Kit) you can find some pages we created for you to print out and distribute wherever they are needed.

For now we chose to use the German foodsharing's logo, but this can still be subject to change, since we may aim to create our own logo. Furthermore we totally support you adapting our info and files to your own initiative's style, so don't hesitate to use your own stuff! (But maybe show us what you got, we're always curious... )