Yume’s Katy Barfield has won an AFR (Australian Financial Review) 100 Women of Influence award in the Business and Entrepreneur category for her leadership and innovation in the food waste space.
As an online B2B marketplace, Yume was launched in 2016 and allows food suppliers, manufacturers, producers and importers to use the platform and sell quality surplus food at a discount to commercial buyers.
Yume has 2500 registered buyers and 250 suppliers, including Unilever, Mondelez, Accor Hotels and has recently signed a partnership with Kellogg’s, where the company can now list its surplus raw materials that become available during the manufacturing process exclusively through Yume.
“It is a great honour to receive this recognition, a testament to the importance of the work we are doing at Yume. We thank AFR, Qantas, Sodexo, Korn Ferry and the incredible panel of judges for increasing awareness that there is a solution for commercial food industry waste in Australia,” said Barfield.
“We’re urgently calling on all food manufacturers and primary producers to join Yume, so that we can help prevent this food, which takes time, money and valuable resources to grow, pick, pack and distribute, from going to waste.”
Yume states it has sold over 1,200,000kg of quality surplus food to food service giants around the country, returning $4.5 million to Australian farmers and manufacturers, and has saved an estimated 84 million litres of embodied water, as well as 2,422 tonnes of carbon dioxide from being released.
