Last January, the government reactivated the bill to prevent food losses and waste, which aims to inaugurate a legal framework to prevent food waste, where the first priority will always be human consumption, through the donation or redistribution of food, forcing the operators of the food chain to have a bread of prevention that allows identifying where the losses and Implement measures to minimize them.
This initiative comes to combat a problem quantified by Eurostat in the waste of 2.8 Mt of food that went to waste during 2023 in Spain.
Faced with this problem, We find initiatives that are ahead of this new bill, such as the one carried out by the startup Naria, which digitizes the third sector by interconnecting all the agents of the food chain, and Gourmet Catering & events, one of the leaders in its sector, satisfying each year the culinary needs of more than 360,000 diners and more than 2,500 events. Both entities have collaborated to ensure that the nearly 4,000 kg of food surplus donated by Gourmet are accepted 100% by the Valencia Food Bank, generated about 10,000 food rations for families in a situation of nutritional insufficiency and in risk of social exclusion, and avoiding the emission of almost 10 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Prior to its partnership with Naria, in April 2023, Gourmet Catering set out to find an efficient method to record, manage, and improve its waste and surplus of gastronomic production. The lack of a comprehensive solution to waste valuable resources, both time and economic, trying to find a way to manage food in a kitchen system of use. Corinna Heilmann, Director of Business Development and Institutional Relations at Gourmet Catering & events, highlights: “Our partnership with NARIA represents a great boost and an innovative advance in our efforts to address food waste, a particularly complex and demanding issue in our sector, due to the rigorous quality controls we are subjecting to.”
Thanks to Naria’s digital platform, Gourmet Catering manages to recover 100% of its surplus products, thus avoiding unnecessary destruction and significantly reducing its carbon footprint. In addition, through the use of blockchain technology, the company can track all its donations, ensuring the integrity of food products and providing total transparency and traceability to its customers.
The implementation of this solution has been a success both in the gastronomic production and innovation center of the catering company and in the kitchens in the Palacio de Congresos de Valencia, where it operates as a catering exclusively. This success not only benefits the community, but also has a positive impact on the company’s economic results, “demonstrating that sustainability and corporate social responsibility go hand in hand,” as explained by Naria.
As will be remembered, the startup Naria closed in mid-2023 a round of financing of €400,000, backed by one of its shareholders, Capsa Food, through Capsa Vida, TheFoodTechLab and Javier Artiach.