Hundreds of Heroes, three categories, one award show
Food waste is a big issue! Tackle this issue by becoming a Food Hero! In March 2019 we crownded three Food Heroes in three categories during an award show at the CFIA Expo in Rennes: EnVie for Fruit & Vegetables, In Ovo for Male Animals and Mussella for Fish & Seafood. Read more about the comments of the jury about our Food Heroes Award winners below!
What makes Envie special is not the soup they make of Belgian surplus vegetables, but the way they do it and the impact they create. Already in the first months achieving sales of over 44.000 bottles of soup! Envie addresses 2 key societal issues: food waste and unemployment. Started as a social enterprise, Naomi understood that alone she would not be able to create impact and in fairly short time she managed to involve a variety of partners such as McCain, vegetable auction Reo, a tomato grower and supermarket Colruyt. What makes Envie a unique story of companies, SMEs and social entrepreneurs working together to reduce food waste and unemployment.
Envie shows the most complete story of the value of food in our society. It is a holistic story; it places food in the heart of our society, by the combination with social employment and food banks. To reduce food waste we have to change society and that is what Envie is trying to do. It is feasible, scalable, co-creative and has a beautiful narrative. It scores high on impact because the involvement of a retail partner (scalability) and engages society. This solution is good for: food, people and environment.
In Ovo is a screening technology to detect the gender of the eggs in the laying hen industry already 9 days before hatching. In this way the male eggs can be removed from the process, thus avoiding chick culling of one day old male chicks. This fast-screening technology can be adopted in the complete hatching sector and will thus have a huge impact. It is very innovative and it represents the highest level of food waste reduction in the waste hierarchy, thus really saving resources. And at the same time saving animals.
The Mussel farming company Briere Myticulture has chosen to solve the issue of 50% food wastes in traditional mussel production by developing several products from undersized mussels and from shells. This food waste problem is mainly caused by competition in the market. Undersized mussels are perfectly edible when shelled, but have to compete with cheaper imported shelled mussels. So now the undersized mussels are thrown back into the sea, causing food waste of 50% and also causing environmental problems on the coast. By creating a special market for these undersized shelled mussels using the brand of Mussellas, food waste of this kind of traditional production of mussels is reduced considerably.
This kind of traditional production is still rather common on the coast of Western France. It is very brave of Briere Myticulture to strive for solutions to reduce food waste, caused by market competition. It’s a strong market oriented solution upcycling out-of-spec mussels (that otherwise are left behind at sea). This solution gives a second opportunity to rejected mussels. It’s highly impactful because of its regional origin, taste and flavor!
