The 2024 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit was a gathering like no other—a group of people and organizations across the food waste and food access industries working together to solve the same fundamental problem: we throw away too much food while people still go hungry.
It’s also a uniquely optimistic conference where participants are primed to respond positively to unique food waste solutions, and to hearing about the progress toward solving these important problems. This made the ReFED Summit the perfect venue for Flashfood to launch our 2023 Impact Report.
Annual impact reports are a tough sell to most audiences. They may be incredibly exciting and substantive to the company producing them—we’re so proud of the work we’ve done—but even the best of them can be fairly dry to external audiences. This is why, in our early brainstorming sessions about our 2023 Impact Report, we set out to break the mold a little bit. We wanted to make something that stood out, even to an audience that was already likely to be pretty inclined to the content.
Each year, Flashfood’s annual report shows our community of stakeholders the progress we’ve made toward our goal to feed families, not landfills. Our report traditionally includes three core metrics: pounds of food diverted from landfill, number of affordable meals offered, and dollars saved for our shoppers.
This year, we wanted to contribute a body of work that offered something of value to the discourse on the connected problems of food waste and food insecurity, and one that featured a diverse set of voices in the industry. We feel this demonstrates that collaboration is really the only way to solve these problems—not unlike the theme of the ReFED Summit itself.
We pored over the excellent Insights Engine from ReFED, the nutrition publications from Partnership for Healthier America, and data from the USDA, and we crunched some numbers to draw a couple of clear conclusions:
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We don’t need more food in our food system, we need less waste. There are 44 million people experiencing food insecurity in the U.S. (USDA), but we’re throwing away the equivalent of 145 billion meals annually (ReFED). We only need 48 billion meals to feed 44 million people three meals a day for an entire calendar year. We currently waste 3x what we need.
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We are in the midst of a nutrition crisis, and we believe produce is both the culprit and the solution. According to Partnership for a Healthier America, eating healthily costs an additional $1.50 a day in the US. And the price of produce has drastically outpaced the cost increase of other foods. Today, fewer than 1 in 10 people in the U.S. eat the recommended amount of fruit and vegetables. At the same time, we’re throwing away over 30 million tons of produce per year. To address food waste and food insecurity in one go, throwing away less produce is a great place to start.
With a playful and nostalgic nod to the way we used to consume our news, we launched Flashfood’s 2023 Impact Report as a real life, tangible newspaper, aptly headlined: The Future of Food is Waste. We printed a couple hundred copies, refurbished an old newspaper box, and hit the streets of Baltimore to share our findings with ReFED Summit attendees.
And now we’d like to share it with you! To read Flashfood’s 2023 Impact Report in full, including our impact stats, a case study on SNAP EBT usage on the platform, and our growth plans ahead, visit our website: https://www.flashfood.com/en/impact-report-2023.
About Flashfood:
Flashfood is on a mission to feed families, not landfills. The app marketplace connects shoppers with fresh produce, meat and other groceries at up to 50% off. By partnering with retailers across North America, Flashfood offers shoppers nutritious staples at affordable prices, and reduces the amount of food going to landfills. Flashfood is a remote-first company currently partnered with more than 2,000 stores across 20 store banners, 21 states in the US and 10 provinces in Canada. For more information, please visit www.flashfood.com.