What happens to surplus food in hospitality when it is still perfectly good to eat?

Timothy R Andrews and Sarah Kettel are joined by Dee Vadukul from Plan Zheroes to explore how hospitality businesses can redirect unwanted food to charities and community organisations instead of sending it to waste.

Dee explains how the Plan Zheroes platform connects businesses with nearby charities, why hospitality became an important source of donations, and how sudden closures during Covid-19 created both huge quantities of surplus and increasing demand from people facing food insecurity. The conversation also looks at the environmental cost of food waste and how a relatively simple connection can turn unwanted stock into something genuinely useful.

What we cover

• How Plan Zheroes connects businesses with charities needing food
• Why hospitality businesses became important surplus-food donors
• Redistributing food quickly when restaurants, hotels and caterers close or have excess stock
• How charities claim and collect donations through the platform
• The relationship between food waste and food insecurity
• Why surplus food does not need to end up in landfill
• How businesses can make food redistribution part of their everyday operations

Useful links

• Plan Zheroes
• Donate surplus food through Plan Zheroes
• Plan Zheroes – Our Impact

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Additional Episode Info:

Editing & Visuals by: Timothy R Andrews

Music: Brain Power by Mela, freemusicarchive.org & Pawel Sikorski

Welcome to this, our podcast. Talking Hospitality. I'm Sarah Kettel and this is my co host, Timothy R. Andrews. Hi, Tim.

Hey, Sarah. Happy New Year.

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Okay, I'm going to list three milestones. Stop smoking, stop drinking. All those things I said last year. Just try again. Keep trying. God loves a trier, right?

We all know you can be extremely trying.

You'll never hear the end of it. Talking Hospitality

Talking Hospitality is a podcast looking at issues within hospitality solutions and inspirational stories.

We have Dee Vadukul, who's the business Development manager from the food sharing platform Plan Zheroes. Welcome, Dee.

Hi. Thanks for having me.

You're very welcome. It's great to have you here with us today. So can you tell us about Plan Zheroes and what it does?

Yes, of course. We at Plan Zheroes are essentially food waste heroes, or Zero food waste heroes, as we like to call ourselves.

We essentially run a brokering system between businesses that have surplus food and charities that need it.

Most of these interactions now take place online, so if a business has surplus food to donate, they log in, they just simply upload details of it, and once that donation has gone live, all of the charities in their nearby vicinity will get notification and it's really instant. A charity, if they're interested, can claim it and then they can make arrangements amongst themselves to go and collect it.

It's quite unique in that we're quite an instant model. We are very light, so we don't have any need for storing food or any distribution centres.

Having the platform has meant that our food donations have gone up exponentially, just because the transaction is so instantaneous and so simple for users at both end.

It really is, actually.

I've used Plan Zheroes to redistribute some surplus for a contact of mine I was asked to redistribute, I think it was 40 or 60 kilos of ground cinnamon, which is. Yeah, it's a strange thing to have. And aside from perhaps doing some kind of record breaking nationwide cinnamon challenge.

I didn't really know what to do with it. It went on to Plan Zheroes and I think it was gone by the next day.

From a food charity who just needed it for their kitchen stores because they do hundreds and hundreds of meals every week for the homeless. Incredible.

It is great. But I'm curious, what does 40 kgs of cinnamon look like?

It looks like big sacks, but it smells like Christmas.

Wow. I'm really glad we could help. And that's the great thing about us.

Because we work with such a variety of charities, there is always someone somewhere that can utilise the donation that is posted. Some of our charities have kitchens and storerooms, some of our charities don't.

Some of our charities hire kitchens and might have really limited access to utensils and things like that.

But by and large we find that any food in any format, so in any quantity, so whether it's fresh frozen meat, veg, confectionary, anything, will be accepted by somebody within our charity group.

And what's great is that you don't have to think about it. So, Tim, if you did find yourself with, I don't know, say, 100 kilos of cabbages, you wouldn't have to think, who would like these cabbages?

Because the platform does that for you. It finds these people.

That's right, yeah.

So, Dee, I've seen on your website there's some big old numbers on there of the amount of tons of surplus food that you have redistributed and also that there was the equivalent of 350,000 meals provided. Now, has that gone up?

Yes, that has. That's gone up considerably, actually. Funnily enough, most of our donors are actually in the hospitality industry.

So we have lots of restaurants that donate to us or donate via us hotel groups, big catering companies who are based inside office blocks, for example. And at the start of the year, things were really tough in terms of obtaining food donations.

The donations just plummeted overnight as businesses had to close their doors at very short notice. And so the volume of donations that we've seen across the platform as a whole, the number of donations has somewhat decreased.

But what we found, especially either side of both lockdowns, is that companies who do have to shift big volumes of food at very short notice are able to do so by giving us a call. We've definitely surpassed the amount of food that we've diverted from landfill this year.

This has largely been as a result of maybe 10 really large donations, as opposed to the normal number of Donations we'd have every month.

And is that because of the lockdowns coming in and out?

Yes, yeah, very much. And in some cases, sadly, we've seen businesses have had to close permanently as well, so helping them clear out stock rooms and things like that.

But it's not going to waste, which is a great thing.

Absolutely.

So where is most of your food going?

Mostly charities, mostly in London. We're a London based charity.

However, the technology allows us to to build these connections between businesses and charities anywhere that Google Maps works. So we do have relationships with businesses as far as Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh and Glasgow.

We're hopefully going to be working on some projects in Jersey as well in the new year. It's exactly the same process.

If a business has surplus food and they're registered to the platform, they can donate it and charities will collect it.

The types of charities that we work with in London, they range from homeless shelters and people that run outreach services, work with people that are experiencing homelessness that could, that could do with a hot meal, warm supplies and things like that. Then we work with community organisations such as the Real Junk Food Project. So we connected with them at the start of the first lockdown.

Similarly, they run a community outreach program where they provide food packages to families that might be struggling to make ends meet. And they also have an honesty cafe as well.

So they make hot dishes with some of the food that they save from landfill, which they sell on at a nominal price. But people that come and enjoy the food can also pick up groceries and fruit and vegetables for a really small donation.

How did Plan Zheroes come about? What inspired it?

Plan Zheroes was originally founded by three members, Lottie, Maria, Anna and Chris Wilkie. Chris is still on the board of trustees. He's very active as the chair. And Lottie is the heart and soul of Plan Zheroes, really.

She experienced hunger firsthand as a refugee during World War II. That led to the vision of a world where no one should go hungry.

She's in her 90s now, but to this day she still talks about experiencing panic if she's in the queue at the post office, for example, and how she'll always pack a sandwich if she does go out. She's not as mobile as perhaps she was ten years ago, but it's had a really long lasting impact on her.

And so this vision that no one should go hungry kind of came about with this idea that we should be able to take surplus food, we should be able to find surplus food and get it to people that need it. Before it has chance to go to waste.

Thank you for sharing.

That's amazing. What a vision. And the fact that she's still doing it.

Yes, she's still really active and involved with everything that Plan Zheroes do.

Plan Zheroes? What does that mean? Why is it called Plan Zheroes? What's the story?

That's a really good name and it's a bit of a Marmite of a name. Either you love it or you just don't get it.

When Plan Zheroes was born, it was all around this idea that Marks and Spencers at the time had their Plan B and Plan B was talking about their sustainability commitments, better fishing practices, better garment making practices, that sort of thing. Plan Zheroes's take on things at the time was that there is no Plan B.

You've either got Plan A, which is fix everything now, or we go to Plan Z, with a last option, as it were.

What does the future hold for Plan Zheroes?

We've had to move with the times quite rapidly. This year has been quite difficult for all charities.

There was a recent Guardian article that reported an estimated loss of 6.4 billion billion pounds across the charitable giving as a whole. And we're very much included in that. Essentially, the more money we manage to raise, the more meals we manage to get to people that need them.

The demand for food banks has gone up exponentially as well during COVID I think the demand went up over 80% during that time. Was it 8, 0 84, to be precise, yeah.

And of course that comes back to us because our charities contact us, asking, desperate for donations that just aren't available.

And anytime a donation is posted on our platform, we're noticing that it's claimed within seconds rather than perhaps minutes or hours, which is what would have happened before. Food waste is a huge problem.

It's something that has been around for a really long time and we're hoping that as companies and organizations become a lot more conscious, that there will be an active effort in reducing it. At the moment, we waste something like 9.5 million tonnes per year of food, 70% of which comes from households.

Same time, 8.4 million people go hungry or face food insecurity, and that's the equivalent of the size of the population of London at the moment. It's colossal.

That's mad.

For the New Year, we do, of course, work with businesses that have surplus food, so we're going to work more closely with some of those businesses and demonstrate our value to them, especially being able to help them at such short notice. During Sudden Business clos.

So we're going to be trying to implement things like payroll giving, which will help us to guarantee a regular income stream. We're going to be looking for businesses to sponsor us so we'd be their charity of the year. And in turn we can offer lots of CSR type opportunities.

Is that the event that was held at Borough Market?

And I guess it's that whole thing about small businesses, small charities, making an impact in your direct community that you can see. I think that was the attraction and it was a way of asking companies to take part in a team building, corporate social responsibility or CSR event.

Having a really fun day, but all the time raising awareness about food waste and food poverty and the food that was the meals that were cooked.

So there were over a thousand meals cooked at each event, went to 1,000 individuals within local charities around Southwark, around Borough Market, and of course there was enough food to feed the participants as well. And year on year, the event has just grown in popularity.

Absolutely priceless for an employer of a food business. What can I do to get in touch with you?

Give us a call or the quickest, most instant way is to register via our website.

So just go to planzeros.org that's P.. L.. A.. N.. Z.. E.. R.. O.. E.. S.. dot..org

"Plan Zheroes.org"

I did mention that all charities have suffered, but by helping Plan Zeros, we're helping lots and lots of other charities as well.

Thank you.

Thank you guys as well. It's been really good. All right, speak soon. Take care. Bye bye.

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