Otro camino contra el hambre
Translator: Gisela Giardino
Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
Way more food is wasted
than what is needed
to eradicate hunger.
And it’s wasted for incredible reasons.
Because it’s aesthetically unpleasant.
Imagine this tomato
half green, half red,
or this crooked carrot.
They seldom reach
supermarkets, retailers,
because they think we won’t buy them.
Food is wasted because,
for example, its packaging is broken.
And it’s wasted even though,
individually,
the packages are closed.
Or if there’s loose food.
Food is wasted
because it’s about to expire.
Imagine a box of milk
about to expire on Tuesday.
Nobody buys it on a Sunday.
That’s a lot of food,
it’s a huge amount of food.
It is more than a third
of the world’s production.
It’s over 1.3 billion tons.
However, more than 2 billion people
don’t have the money to buy
a portion of healthy food every day,
and suffer from what’s called
food insecurity.
How come?
This was the question we asked ourselves
with a group of friends
and we tried to think ways
to contribute to the solution.
We started out with the typical model
of traditional assistentialism,
with volunteers and donated food
which is delivered to food kitchens.
When we started learning,
as we worked on it,
we realized that this model
has two key problems.
The first is that
little healthy food arrives.
Because for producers, in general,
is cheaper to throw away the food
than to donate it.
Think of a producer
of fruit and vegetables,
that leaves the produce on the ground
because they can’t afford the costs
of picking it up and taking it
to a donation center.
Or an industrial producer
who throws away food
instead of donating due to the costly
logistics to make it accessible.
This especially happens in countries
where there are no tax incentives
to donate food,
like ours.
So, if you want access to healthy food
you have to buy it, there’s no other way.
The second key problem is that
since everything is donated,
the time people work is also donated.
They are volunteers who make
an amazing job, for sure,
but they don’t guarantee
the quality standards
to make it work over time.
To make it sustainable.
You need professional people,
who is trained in food handling,
who is licensed to transport food
professionally.
You can’t ask a volunteer
a Saturday at 3 a.m.
to fetch food and deliver it
to a food kitchen,
or ask a person to go
on a rainy Sunday or in flooding.
If you want a service that guarantees
the quality standard you require
so that the food arrives
safely where it has to,
you need to pay for that.
There’s no option.
We realized, too,
that the gift comes out expensive.
That being poor is more expensive.
That low-income people
pay for most of the food they consume.
Only a small fraction is donated.
And finally, the truth is that
because a little amount of the food
they get is donated,
they end up paying it higher
than the rest of us
due to the amount of intermediaries.
They pay more for food;
being poor is more expensive.
And because it’s more expensive
they end up buying lower quality foods
which are cheaper.
And that only perpetuates
the malnutrition cycle.
We learned that the model
of donations and volunteering
is great for when
there is an emergency,
like COVID just showed.
But it’s not enough to get people out
of this macabre lock-up
that keeps them poor and poorly fed.
On this journey, we learned
that we need to have professional people,
dedicated 24/7 to contribute
to solving a giant problem:
hunger.
So, we needed to have people
investing in research and development,
in technology, in developing processes
that would guarantee
sustainability over time.
We realized that to have all this
you have to pay for those services.
And so we brought in
this alternative idea,
to add to those already existent,
that the market is
a very powerful means
for social and nutritional impact.
If we can generate the resources
to later reinvest them
on a social mission
that can make people have access
to cheaper and good quality food,
then we would make them save on costs
compared to what they already pay today.
That’s why we created a company.
A professional company
for a guaranteed distribution of food
in low-income neighborhoods.
And we eliminated the intermediaries.
And we managed to offer
healthy, cheap food,
at a lower price than they pay today.
It has a digital ecosystem
that works like this:
we upload the food that
we have available to an app,
food we buy from producers
to prevent the food from getting spoiled,
and we offer it through the app
to the food kitchens
and clients from the private sector
running sustainability campaigns.
We manage the logistics of the delivery.
We guarantee an end-to-end traceability
of the operation
and we’ve already completed
more than 8500 deliveries
to more than 1800 food kitchens,
that feed about 130,000 people.
We’re operating in Argentina, Guatemala,
Mexico and Puerto Rico.
And we learned in this journey
that the market is very powerful
instrument for social impact.
We learned that
if you don’t have the means
there’s not going to be any less hunger,
there’s going to be more hunger.
The enemy, the devil,
it’s not the money, it’s hunger.