LFS 350 has finally come to an end…but what will happen to Food Wise? Food Wise was created by Group 17 when a member in our group told us about his experience working as a chef. He told us that whenever his restaurant caters for an event, there was a lot of leftover food that ends up in the landfill. He told us that this food can and needs to be save…and that is how Food Wise came to be. That was the very beginning of our project, and now we’ve reached the end of our 3 month exploration. It was quite the roller coaster of a journey, we had our moments where we struggled to accommodate for everyone’s ideas, and moments where we worked synergistically together. Overall, we had fun, and that’s all that matters in the end! Please continue reading to find out about our overall experience in being involved with our community and our project, and what will happen to Food Wise in the future! Below is also the executive summary of Food Wise. Enjoy!
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What?
Overall, our CBEL project allowed us to take our academic knowledge outside of the LFS classroom. It was a great opportunity to take what we learned in class and apply it to real-life situations. CBEL also allowed us to connect with many passionate community members and deepen our understanding and concern for food waste and food insecurity in Vancouver. This experience also allowed some of our members to step out of their comfort zone in meeting and speaking with unfamiliar people. Throughout this project, we have experienced many synergies and tensions within our group. We had moments where we shared similar ideas and interests in ways to approach Food Wise, and moments where we struggled to cooperate with each other. Flexible learning sessions allowed us to come together to solve our disagreements. Flexible learning also gave us the opportunity to take control of our project and to work independently from the classroom environment. These sessions provided us with the time to work and be productive as a group, as well as time to meet with our stakeholders.
So What?
We learned that projects aimed to make major change requires collaboration from various stakeholders, therefore, starting our project at a smaller-scale may have been the preferred approach (as suggested by David Speight from Wescadia). We also learned that creating a functional project is mostly based around organizations and people who are willing and wanting to make change for them and their community. For example, all of our stakeholders would like to make their businesses more sustainable and able to help food insecure households, they just need the resources, organization and networking to do so. Their eagerness to make change is what could potentially make Food Wise a successful program. The integration of academics and the community is rare in our education system and bolsters and enhances our learning experience tremendously. CBEL also helped us realize the appropriate way to approach our stakeholders. The TedTalk by Ernesto Sirolli, Want to Help Someone? Shut up and Listen!, inspired us to listen to the problems and points of view of our stakeholders rather than telling them what we think they should change about their business or organization. We should address what they want us to do rather than what we think is the right thing to do.
Now What?
We realized that Food Wise has a great potential to expand and become successful due to the large support from our community members. With the support of our community members, many of us are interested in continuing Food Wise after LFS 350 has ended. If we continue to work just as hard as we did in LFS 350, Food Wise can become a fully functional program in no time! Overall, we had a tough 3 months together, but it was enjoyable nevertheless. Even though our group met up once a week, we did not consider each other as strangers, rather, we were (and still are) the creators of Food Wise–we are colleagues and friends!
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Executive Summary:
Food Wise was a project created by Group 17 to study the barriers that prevent food recovery programs from expanding and to obtain the perspectives of food waste and recovery from members of the foodservice industry and consumers. With this in mind, we aim to expand existing food recovery programs such as Community Angel Food Runners. Our project’s objective is to strengthen the connection between the hospitality/foodservice industry and the Greater Vancouver Food Bank, where GVFB receives surplus food from hotels/caterers and redistributes it to those in need, thus decreasing food waste. Our inquiry question aims to explore the barriers present in expanding food rescue programs, and whether Food Wise can continue after LFS 350.
In order to gather information on the food waste issue, we first emailed all of our potential stakeholders: hotels and catering companies, in order to receive their opinion and feedback on food rescue, as well as existing food rescue/exchange programs, such as Angel Food Runners, Quest and Directions, in order to understand their structure, difficulties and interest in expanding. We also interviewed 12 consumers to hear if they would support businesses that donated food. Through these interviews, which consisted of open-ended questions specifically designed for each stakeholder being interviewed, we found that 10 out of the 12 consumers were supportive of food rescue and 4 of the 5 hotels/caterers interviewed were concerned with improving food security and reducing food waste in Vancouver. They showed interest and were supportive of Food Wise’s goals of expanding the food rescue network. They also expressed interested in potentially donating their surplus food to food rescue programs if they had to time to implement it into their corporate culture.
Some recommendations we came across from our findings were to implement a food waste tax, which would create a disincentive for food service businesses to throw away excess food, and instead donate it. We also had the idea of creating a Food Wise certification program which certifies food service companies that are donating surplus food to food rescue programs, giving them a logo to put on their advertisements, which would give them positive PR and increase sales, incentivizing them to donate. In addition, we would like to continue raising awareness around the Food Donor Encouragement Act. Lastly, we suggested to create a “trial run” with the Community Angel Food Runners and a stakeholder in order to determine the viability of Food Wise in the long-run.
