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Foodservice company Sodexo Australia has announced a food waste initiative that will minimise environmental damage.

Sodexo has partnered with online surplus food wholesale marketplace Yume, from whom it has already purchased 9920 kilograms of food, to help fight food waste.

Country president Mark Chalmers said the partnership forms part of Sodexo’s Better Tomorrow 2025 corporate responsibility roadmap, and will see products purchased through Yume used at Sodexo sites across Australia.

“Globally, Sodexo serves 100 million consumers every day, so we have tremendous capacity to reduce waste by improving how we deliver our services,” he said.

“We’re dedicated to finding new ways to minimise our collective waste and environmental impact and partnering with Yume is a great way to do this.”

Recently, Sodexo Australia purchased over 500 kilograms of Australian feta cheese, more than five tonnes of crushed tomatoes and a range of poultry products including coated chicken fillets and southern style chicken portions.

Yume sells surplus stock of food from HACCP-accredited suppliers including Unilever Foods Solutions, Mondelez and Huon, and others, to prevent it from going to waste.

To-date Yume has returned over $1.5 million to Australian farmers and manufacturers and has diverted 300,000kg of product from going to waste.

Environmentally, this equates to 600 tonnes of CO2 prevented and over 20.7 million litres of water saved.

“We encourage other corporate catering and facilities management companies to get on board with Yume as we can only create a better tomorrow by taking positive actions today,” Chalmers said.

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