Please read through them carefully, so that you can avoid some common mistakes and will have your local foodsharing initiative flourishing! We want you to succeed and therefore share our experiences in different areas of the world, so don't hesitate to adapt our approach to your situation as much as you see fit!
And please tell us how this all works out for you!
→ Contact us via ! !
→ Join our team chat for direct communication: https://slackin.yunity.org/
We wish you all the best for your foodsaving and sharing! Thank you very much for your will to fight food waste together with us!
Food-Share Point
Food-Share Points get stocked by individuals who happen to have a surplus of food they cannot eat before it perishes (e. g. before going on vacation or because of mistakenly having bought something they don't like). Everybody is entitled to take out food without any attached obligation or need of further legitimation.
Every Food-Share Point is managed by a team of local foodsavers. Everybody can organize Food-Share Points and we recommend to build a team of responsible people and at least one head of the operation to keep the overview. This team takes care of cleaning and makes sure that no risky food is shared. (More info on what is classified as risky food further down.)
Every Food-Share Point needs to have the rules, the statement on politics and religion (if necessary) and the cleaning rota displayed, respected and filled out accordingly (You can find template documents in the appendix of this manual.)
If you use a foodsaving platform like foodsharing.de or foodsaving.world, be sure to enter your Food-Share Point there, as it facilitates managing the team, the cleaning schedule and the communication.
The location needs to be accessible for as many people as possible, ideally for everyone. If spaces are chosen that are somehow linked to party politics or religion we display our statement on politics and religion on the Food-Share Point for everybody to see. To stay true to our distance to party politics, we never use party constituency offices! Locations linked to religion of any kind can only be used if people of different or no faith are also able to reach the Food-Share Point without any problems.
Since the legal situation in every country is different it is of utmost importance, that you check it out beforehand if you don't want to run into bad surprises! In Germany we had a deal with the authorities to be classified as a private endeavor since we don't take any money and intend the food to be taken out by individuals on their own accounts. But even after all the talking and bargaining with the German bureaucracy we recently faced some problems we need to figure out now. So be sure to talk to a lawyer or someone who knows the legal circumstances to questions like:
Information to be printed out and displayed at the Food-Share Point. The rules sheet and the cleaning rota should be visible and respected at every Food-Share Point, whereas the statement on politics and religion only needs to be put up if the nature of the location requires clarification on those topics. Templates for rules sheet and cleaning rota in English language and with formatting are to be found in the appendix of this manual. Feel free to use them or translate, modify and extend them as you see fit!
Since the statement on politics and religion is text only, we didn't prepare a template for it and only put it down here:
Always be extra careful with meat and fish! But when it comes to the ground or minced variants of these animal products, we think that not even cautiousness is enough, so please don't share those!
This refers to raw milk cheese like mozzarella, camembert, feta or Harz cheese. Some types of hard cheese are also made from raw milk, but the long maturing time kills most of the possibly dangerous bacteria so hard cheese can be shared via Food-Share Points. In old times dairy products like yoghurt, curd and cottage cheese were made from raw milk as well, but today the industry uses almost always pasteurized milk, that was briefly heated up to high temperatures. All products made from pasteurized milk are sharable.
Raw egg is extremely attractive to germs and homemade puddings, creams and mayos can quickly become a health hazard. Industrially produced egg-based food is made to last longer, treated in various sophisticated ways to reach that goal and therefore can be shared via Food-Share Points.
Due to heavy regulations in most countries and huge potential health risks alcohol and other drugs are not to be distributed via Food-Share Points or foodsharing in general.
Since we approach this subject from a German/European perspective, there may be kinds of food we don't even think about, but which may be common in your area and as delicate as the ones mentioned above. We also can not foresee how big of an impact the maybe very different climate in your region may have, so please be aware, that this list is not necessarily finished and should be only used as a starting point for you to work with. Meaning: Extend it as you see fit so that it can do justice to your circumstances!
In the case of foodsharing, unconditional sharing of food means
The foodsavers themselves can keep as much food as they can make use of and share the rest with other people on their own accord. We wish the sharing to be as sustainable as possible. That means that unnecessarily far trips for the sole purpose of picking up food should be avoided and that going by foot or by bike is better than using fueled vehicles. It can be useful though to take a car if you have plenty of food to pick up and a cargo bike is not spacious enough or not available.
Our kind of sharing is unconditional which means, that nobody has to be needy in any kind of way to get food from us. The main focus is definitely the prevention of waste. It is not important, who eats the food, as long as it does not end up in a container! In some countries there is a legal definition on who counts as a 'person in need', but we distance ourselves from any judgement in that regard, since we don’t arrogate to decide who is more needy or which projects are more worth supporting. It is not our scope and not at all our goal to judge people willing to save food regarding their level of neediness. We also want to avoid the risk of stigmatisiation linked to any declaration as ‘needy’. Therefore, anyone regardless of their origin, social status or belief may recieve saved food from us.
Selling saved food is strictly forbidden! This would highly contradict the main idea of foodsharing. It is also not allowed to accept donations for the provided food. Greediness leading to excessive storage, or even with the consequence of saved food rotting and having to be thrown away after all, also stands opposite to the idea of unconditional sharing.
Always try to behave along the lines of:
