Existing initiatives
- Tais Real
- Janina Abels
- Arno Döpper
This page aims to collect information on already existing foodsharing and -saving projects around the world. The data presented here was collected by ourselves and contributed by active people from the mentioned initiatives. The order is based on the alphabet.
Other pages:
- Nick has /wiki/spaces/~nicksellen/pages/77922309 that he collected himself
CANADA - Kingston - Taste before you waste
not in personal contact
CANADA - Ottawa - Foodsharing Ottawa
not in personal contact
DENMARK - Foodsharing Copenhagen
Info collected by Tilmann
Started by volunteers of Floating City, yunity and others in May 2016.
Public facebook group with >2500 members, hidden (secret) facebook group for active volunteers (>50 members)
Website for information and to sign up as foodsaver
Stores: big market, bakery and supermarket (on hold)
Update 2017-01-12: New Slack chat for team communication since November 2016. Food from the big market is mainly distributed at one indoor share point that they can use for free.
ECUADOR - Cuenca - foodsharing Cuenca
2nd group in Ecuador, just emerging in Spring 2018
ECUADOR - Quito - foodsharing Quito
1st group in Ecuador, started by Fausto and Chalo.
ENGLAND - London - OLIO
Blog post about Marilyn Kendall
not in personal contact
ENGLAND - Jersey - OLIO
Blog post about City Champion Elis Joudalova
not in personal contact
FRANCE - Nantes - DLC, Détournement Libre de Consommables
Info collected by Tais Real, Clément and Chloé visited Berlin in October 2016
Clément and Chloé started around January 2016 a facebook group based on foodsharing.de's experience.
Community: 700 members on a public Facebook group (by 08/2016), without advertisement
Stores: 2 cooperating supermarkets, about 7 pickups a weeks with a lot of fruits and vegetables
Legal: registered as an association on the Loi 1901, costs 85€/year to insure active members. Haven't contacted the municipality directly. Active members sign a ''Charte'' manually.
Difficulties: getting more stores to cooperate. Have tried mostly supermarkets. A bit messy at first, as all volunteers were invited to go and ask stores without preparation. Will try from Sept. 2016 onwards to look for more stores with a more structured, professional approach. Law of Feb.2016 (supermarkets must try to give away their leftovers) : an association needs to be a charity and at least 2 years old to be eligible to receive the unsold food.
Tried to implement a different tool than Facebook but very few people transited to Slack and Trello.
How does it work? Members who want to become active pay a 5€ subscription to cover the costs of the association. About 25 active members. Each pick-up needs one active member and a car. They can choose to donate to a charity, put the food in a ''Boîte Utile'', 4 existing boxes in Nantes where people give and get all sorts of things for free (without a fridge, completely open in the streets), or redistribute. They often choose the later option and write on Facebook where they will redistribute, often at their home with fixed times.
They have a quiz but it is not compulsory. 2 trial pick-ups.
Interested to try out a basic software if it's in French.
ISRAEL - Foodsharing Haifa
not in close contact yet
ITALY - Bari - Avanzi Popolo
not in personal contact
ITALY - Malo - foodsharing Malo
small but growing initiative run by Isabella Dal Balon (isabella on Slack)
no online representation
ITALY - Milan - Recup
Article by Veronica Tarozzi about Recup
not in personal contact
ITALY - Padua - Cucina Brigante
Info provided by Former user (Deleted).
"Once weekly we save food from the wholesale market with a big van and redistribute it to local people. We also used to prepare lunch to which anyone is invited, but lately someone is complaining about it, and trying to stop it. Still, we are trying to find a way :wink: Also participating to free markets and other events and spreading the word."
ITALY - Pavia - Alimentando
Article by Veronica Tarozzi about Alimentando
not in personal contact
NETHERLANDS - Amsterdam - Taste before you waste
not in personal contact
NETHERLANDS - Amsterdam - Guerilla Kitchen
not in personal contact
NETHERLANDS - Bussum - Taste before you waste
not in personal contact
NETHERLANDS - Maastricht - Foodsharing Maastricht
Information provided by Niki Ba on facebook
Informative article on foodsaving.world
NETHERLANDS - Utrecht - Taste before you waste
facebook fanpage
facebook group volunteers
not in personal contact
NETHERLANDS - Foodsharing Rotterdam
Info provided by Simon Damstra and below-mentioned yuniteers
Started by yunity travellers (Philip Engelbutzeder, Axel Kalitzki, Selina Camile, Lara Earthling, Paul Free and maybe some others) who were invited to the/wiki/spaces/YUN/pages/32440553 building, the facebook group currently has almost 600 members. A team of approximately 10 volunteers does food pick-ups and distribution events, a core team of 3 (Simon, Jan Peter, Robin) manages and activates them.
Cooperations: pick-ups at the wholesale market are ongoing on Wednesday and Saturday at 7am, smaller cooperations (like bakeries) are inactive. They negotiate with the merchants at the wholesale market to only take the better food, because of limited transportation capacity. There are two other teams that pick up food at the market.
Transportation: they can use the van of a inhabitant of Antonius, who also donates the gas
Distribution: at the Antonius building, mostly to people from the area. People in the building are not so interested as of limited cooking possibilities. They can use a big fridge to store food for the next days
Leftovers: they give the bad & leftover fruit to a woman who feeds it to animals
Difficulties:
- handing over responsibilities from the core team to volunteers - people at the market could get confused if new people show up each time
- finding trustworthy & passionate volunteers that can organize themselves and others is hard
- they are looking for something similar to a front person, who is driving the volunteers to be active
Contact: Tilmann is in contact with Simon Damstra from the core team.
NETHERLANDS - Foodsharing Wageningen en omgeving
Contributed by Sana Rajkovic
Community: between 10-15 core foodsaver
Cooperations: small shops, market stands, restaurants
Fairsharer: fridge at THUISwageningen
How does it work: use of facebook for team-organisation, sensibilisation and sharing
Contact: wageningenfoodsharing@gmail.com
POLAND - Foodsharing Łódź
Latest update from 2018-09-28, Janina Abels and Tilmann visited and met up with 2 foodsavers.
One Food-Share Point in university, not many regular cooperations and way too little volunteers. They try to condense their big facebook group for volunteers to build and actually functional group now.
POLAND - Foodsharing Warsaw
Latest update from 2018-09-28, Janina Abels and Tilmann visited and met up with 7 foodsavers.
Foodsharing Warszawa has around 60 members. They have cooperations with 20+ stores, which are mostly one-person pickups, managed through their Karrot group. Members are encouraged to bring picked up food to the public fridges (Jadłodzielnie). They are mostly communicating in their closed facebook group which has lots of discussions.
There are some stores where many people want to pick up. Some people do so more often because they are immediately clicking the "join pickup" button when it appears. Talking helped to alleviate to a certain degree, but sometimes the people just don't reply or when asked to meet up to clarify the situation, they say they are busy. Many in the group are of the opinion that those doing "nice" pickups should also help with hard pickups. (Noteworthy: despite this problem, most people respect the pickup settings, they don't increase max slots. So far, there might have been one person in the Warsaw group who did it.)
If people miss a pickup, it's sometimes hard to reach them. And Karrot still says that they did it.
There was a person in the group who offended many. They made a decision to remove him and told him "as you have been kicked out, you should leave our karrot group". This bluff worked, probably because the person didn't know that there were no admin roles in karrot.
Discussions in the facebook group are sometimes heated. This puts off people who want to introduce newcomers. Our discussion round liked the option to turn off comments for posts (in facebook).
Not many new people join and even less stay. They usually do advertising via their public facebook page. "For every 3 posts, 1 person joins."
There are not many people coming to meetups and not much in-person discussion. This leads to a feeling of low cohesion in the group.
At least one person has been requesting food deliveries from the group for reasons of being poor but having no time to pick up food. This is half met with resistance, half with support.
For starting cooperations with big stores, they miss people with more transport capacity. Not many have a car and there is no cargo bike culture in Warsaw (so far at least...). A cooperation with car rental companies could be a intermediate solution.
They avoid forming an association to reduce liablity and fees. This makes it harder to cooperate with big stores who usually want to a contract.
For a recent city event, a group member made a board game where players have to gather ingredients for a meal by picking up food from public fridges. The fridge on the game board closely resemble the real locations. It looks very well-done, printed on thick A0-sized paper, cardboard pieces for ingredients and cards for the meals. It was a hit with the children at the event.
POLAND - Foodsharing Wrocław
Latest update from 2018-09-28, Janina Abels and Tilmann visited and met up with 5 foodsavers.
Many Food-Share Points all over the city, but mostly put up by a different organization. Basically no regular cooperations with stores, but spontaneous pickups when called. Unclear state of collaboration with the other organization, but definitely motivation to proceed.
RUSSIA - Moscow, St. Petersburg
Contact: Анастасия Терехина via Tilmann
Web-site: http://www.foodsharingrussia.ru/
We aim to collaborate with organizations based on foodsharing.de's experience. The project is fully non-commercial. All related costs are held by members who manage it.
Started: July 2015
Community:
- ~2500 in Moscow (separate group in VK.com - https://vk.com/foodsharing_msk),
- ~3700 in St. Petersburg (separate group in VK.com - https://vk.com/foodsharing_spb)
Active members: several hundred
Collaborate with: ~30 stores, cafes, etc. Usually we have several pick-ups every day, apart from regular activities we have been involved in some events like cooking the world biggest Greek salad in Moscow on the Red Square
Totally saved: over 28 000 kg of food.
How does it work? Members who want to become active have to sign up, take a quiz and wait for the facilitator’s invitation to join the team. 1 trial pick-up is mandatory.
Tools: free tools - group chat on VK.com, Google Sheets, etc.
Difficulties: getting more stores, cafes, etc. to cooperate. Getting more active volunteers to establish contacts with organizations and develop the project. Current legislation does not include foodsharing possibilities so in some cases stores are required to dispose leftovers.
RUSSIA - VK Foodsharing page
Summary of the page by Kirill:
This page works like a bulletin board for people, who have more food than they need. On this page they are leaving their offers (for example: "5 kg of potato, Pushkina street 12, +7917..., after 18:00 till the end of this month") and everybody can contact them, visit and get the food.
- No meat, no fish, no seafood
- They also have a special topic for sharing clothes, pets, tools and some other stuff
- It isn't connected with shops, just individual offers
- Around 10-20 new offers per day
- Sometimes it's offers from shops, sometimes from charitable organizations -- everything in one list
not in personal contact
SCOTLAND - Foodsharing Scotland
tbw
SCOTLAND - Foodsharing Edinburgh
Info provided by Jess Acton via facebook in November 2017
"We're funded by the Climate Challenge Fund (Scottish Government) on the basis that we reduce carbon emissions, and that pays for equipment and expenses and my salary. We're collecting and redistributing food from 17 local businesses (around 2 tonnes a month) and we also are running around 3 Disco Soups a year. We're thinking of changing the Disco Soup format for summer to make it more like a food show.
We do a weekly free food table on a local park (Waste not Wednedays!) and run sustainable cooking classes with students. We also have a research project going on at the moment which is looking at preventing business food waste."
SPAIN - Barcelona - La Xarxa d'Aliments de Gràcia (Banc Expropriat)
Info provided by Lukas Gebhard in March 2019
Community: The Xarxa d'Aliments de Grácia exists since several years now. It is one of the initiatives of the community Banc Expropriat, a squad in Barcelona's neighbourhood Grácia. The Xarxa has weekly meetings. At each meeting, there is an agenda of topics to be discussed. During the discussion, participants come and go to pick up food at cooperating stores nearby. In the end, every participant receives an equal share of the saved food. The Xarxa is generally open to newcomers.
Food-Share Points: None.
Stores: About 15 stores (including bakeries, markets, and organic stores).
Legal: No legal arrangement.
Difficulties:
Plans:
SPAIN - Bilbao - Foodsharing Bilbao
Contact: Unai Gaztelu
Community: Emerging, more info after the intro event on 2017-04-08. One closed facebook group for foodsavers and one open one for foodsharers. Management of the pick-ups is organized via foodsaving.world.
Food-Share Points: None so far, but a fridge was already secured and some probable locations spotted.
Stores: One small organic supermarket agreed to daily pick-ups, one panadería allows for random and unscheduled pick-ups
Legal: A translated version of the liability waiver from foodsharing Edinburgh
Plans: Expansion!
SWEDEN - Gothenburg - Solikyl
Contact: Bruno (brunomc on Slack)
There are four detailed articles about Solikyl written by Bruno on foodsaving.today:
- How foodsharing in Gothenburg began
- Main practical challenges
- Tools to connect and to organize
- Strategies for the future
SWEDEN - Borås - foodsharing i Borås
Contact: Lotta of foodsharing Chemnitz
SWEDEN - Östersund - foodsharing i Östersund
Contact: Little Teddy on facebook
SWEDEN - Stockholm - OLIO
Contact: Taras Kucherenko (via facebook)
not in close contact
SWEDEN - Uppsala - Livsmedela
not in close contact
TAIWAN - Taipei - Foodsharing Taiwan
Info provided by stefan_fstaiwan on Slack
Stefan started around April 2016 a facebook group (FB page with 780 likes (by 10/2016)) based on foodsharing.de's experience.
Community: Stefan is the only core person (from 04/16 to 08/16 he got help from a Taiwanese friend), about 15 Foodsaver who pick up food daily, lots of volunteers ask to help. After interviews for different media they got a lot of contacts, but nothing concrete followed, also because it’s very hard to coordinate the whole project with 1-2 core people.
Food-Share Points: 1 fridge and shelf since August 2016. They named it享食站 - Food Hub. It's frequently used by the people, but sometimes empty. A foundation contacted them to donate lots of fridges, but as they aren’t a legal organization, things are not that easy and they don’t have the time to handle this at the moment.
Stores: One bakery (pick-up every day) and one restaurant (pick-up every two days) (10/2016). They call them half an hour before they close, to ask if they have food or not. Every shop has its own facebook group to coordinate everything, using a googledocs file as a calendar to sign in for the pick-ups.
Legal: They have a legal arrangement, according to the Taiwanese law. Foodsharing and the Food Hubs are separated projects, so that it is not guaranteed that the food in the fridges comes from the food from the stores. To get funds and share the legal risk Stefan would like to found or join a legal organization, as at the moment everything happens in his name.
Difficulties: Getting more active support from people (beyond picking up food), getting people who are reliable, engaged, identify with and understand the idea of such a project and behave that way, smooth pick-ups with a nice manner and in time, getting people who look for new cooperations (they went to a bunch of fruit shops already) and sites to set up public fridges, getting more stores to cooperate, getting more publicity, spread the word of foodsharing, networking with other groups, maybe turn into an legal organization and apply for funding
They use IDs, people apply for ID by email, and afterwards Stefan meets them to sign the legal arrangements and hands the ID over. They don’t have a quiz, nor trial pick-ups. Stefan tries to explain the concept in person when he meets the people.
Plans:
As Stefan leaves Taiwan in December 2016 he wants to make sure Foodsharing Taiwan persists in his absence, therefore he thinks it might be a good idea to get the support of a bigger legal organization that might be willing to take the project under its patronage. He is currently (10/2016) looking for such a possibility,
Have a foodsharing event to bring people together and give a presentation on the concept,
Have a platform (webpage, app) in Chinese language.
TURKEY - Ankara - Çerçöp Çorbacılar
Info provided by gigi on Slack
Çerçöp Çorbacılar is freegan group from Ankara, Turkey.
Since 2013, the group prepares soups from saved veggies with refugees, local collectives in public parks or usually in a cafe in Çankaya district. New events are always announced on the facebook page. Çerçöp aims to find local solutions against food wasting in Ankara. That's why the events are open to all locals without any conditions.
Community: +5.000 likes on Facebook page. 3 leaders and around 20 people form the orga-group, which use WhatsApp and mailing lists for the communication.
Stores: The orga-group carries out pick-ups at a Turkish "bazaar" once per week. Also, there is a good connection and cooperation between the group and two big supermarkets. Due to huge amounts of fresh food the group picks up only once a week. Çerçöp uses a very central point in the streets to cook and share the saved food every Sunday.
Difficulties: People are still not familiar with the idea of Foodsharing. Therefore, the first task is always to educate the group and the people of Ankara to rescue more food. People don't usually want to take cooked food or even the fresh rescued food. To change this mentality is the greatest challenge . The group is still working on this task and share the advantages of freeganism on social media. A system without any requirement of membership, where people can easily find the locations of the food share points and take/leave fresh food is needed for the next steps, due to huge amounts of rescued food from Çerçöp. Another difficulty is finding more people to take responsibilities in foodsharing.
USA - Savannah - Food Not Bombs
contact: wutogui on foodsaving worldwide forums
Food Not Bombs is a widespread international organization that has chapters in many cities of the world. They are all independent and not centrally organized, so you never know which one's are still active if you don't have personal contact. Still, here is a map.
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