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The Get Wasted pilot:

turning surplus veggies into soups for schools 

As an EIT Food start-up, networking is in Get Wasted’s nature. To get Get Wasted off the ground, the Get Wasted team brought together and relied on many partners from all parts of the food industry. Now, Get Wasted is an online circular marketplace where farmers and wholesalers can offer food surpluses to actors in the social economy at favourable rates for all parties involved. But in the first pilot phase, matchmaking happened manually by the Get Wasted team.

23 maart 2023

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EIT Food, Growzer, Sense, Rikolto, Special Fruit, and Groothandel Claessens, supported by the City of Antwerp’s Klimaatfonds, rallied their expertise to turn surplus vegetables into soups and smoothies and distribute them to schools. As a result, the Spectrum school in Deurne and two branches of the Antwerp IMS school were able to offer soup made from surpluses to their pupils. “A win-win scenario: our pupils get healthy food at an accessible rate and at the same time we save food from going to waste,” according to Dimitri Meurrens, director of Institute Maris Stella - Sint-Agnes.  

 

Additionally, EIT Food and Rikolto also provided an educational component to the project. Through lessons and workshops in the schools and on-site visits to partners, pupils garnered first-hand experience with food surpluses, local producers and the social economy.  

The Get Wasted pilot ran from September 2021 to June 2023, with the first soups arriving in schools in January 2022. These first steps towards a fully fledged online B2B marketplace for food surpluses, offered extremely useful insights in pinpointing the opportunities and challenges for Get Wasted, and working towards solutions. To read more about these specific opportunities and challenges uncovered in the pilot and the next phases of Get Wasted, head here and here. 

 

Thanks to the continued support of all partners involved, Get Wasted heads into its next phase. Now the platform is launched, scaling up and branching out is key to ensure the continued success of Get Wasted. Thanks to the invaluable support of Circular Flanders, the Get Wasted team is committed to connecting sellers and buyers of perfectly consumable food surpluses to reduce food waste and, together, build a more sustainable and circular future.