Stakeholders in Finland met to tackle food waste challenge

The third stakeholder meeting was held on the 20th of October in the City of Lahti. Our theme was ”From food waste to food Aid for those in need”.  

In the City of Lahti there are NGOs which have developed an organized way to deliver food aid to people in need. The NGO called the Operation Open Door makes a contract with, for example, grocery stores, so that they can receive their donations of edible food, which in the grocery stores are labeled as food waste.

The NGO receives about 85 000 kg of edible food waste per month. Operation Open Door collects and stores donations from different companies in cold storage and passes them on to food distributors. These distributors can then deliver about 17 000 food packages per month to people in need. Beneficiaries are both organizations which also distributes edible food, and for people who are in need for the food aid.

We had lively discussion and we decided to continue with this theme in the next year, too. There were 11 participants in this meeting - six stakeholders, two participants from the Lead Partner and three participants from the City of Lahti team.

Stakeholders were from the Operation Open Door, S-Group grocery store representer, Development Manager from Päijät-Häme's catering services, Education and Food Manager from Vocational Training Center Salpaus and  representative from church food aid.