Bangkok, Thailand – March 10, 2022 – Major Supermarket brands of Thailand such as Tops Market, Central Food Hall, Lotus's and Gourmet Market have joined hands with Yindii to fight against food waste in Thailand, and also to make your grocery shopping more affordable and more sustainable than before.
Yindii, a Thailand based anti-food-waste startup connects eco-conscious, deal seeking hungry customers to delicious unsold, surplus food from premium bakeries, restaurants, and hotel chains at highly discounted prices. Supermarkets, contributing to a substantial percentage of the food waste generated in Thailand, have now decided to partner with Yindii to fight against the major socio-environmental problem of food waste. A customer can now rescue high quality, unsold food such as fruits, vegetables, fresh food, and ready-to-eat meals from supermarkets, at a 50% to 80% discount.
Only 3% of businesses in Thailand measure their food waste, which means there’s no clear data on how much edible food ends up in dumpsters instead of shopping carts. ReFED, an American nonprofit working to end food waste, estimated that retailers generated 10.5 million tons of food waste, sending almost one-third of wasted food to the landfill.
This has a not only critical human & financial consequences, the environmental impact is brutal. Based on Driven to Waste, a new report by WWF and Tesco, global food waste contributes 10% of our global greenhouse gas emissions, not the 8% that was previously thought, and equivalent to nearly four times the annual emissions produced by all the planes in the world.
A growing consumer awareness of the impact of food waste and the need to become more sustainable is compelling all food businesses, especially the supermarkets, to commit to food waste reduction in all means possible.
"This is a major step forward for Thailand to see our major supermarket brands stepping up to address the food waste plague", comments Louis-Alban, Yindii's founder. "Everyday thousands of food items, perfectly edible & safe, are discarded way before expiry dates for business reasons like overstocking, lack of traffic or internal cosmetic standards. With Yindii, we can help revalorize this "lost" food and give it a second life."
Yindii is a win-win methodology for the mission of reducing food waste – where the supermarkets become more sustainable and profitable by selling the unsold food on the platform; and the customers get to save the food, save money and the planet, all while munching delicious food from the comfort of their homes.
Supermarkets participating in the project at the moment are the following :
- Tops Market Rama IX
- Central Food Hall in Central World
- Gourmet Market in Siam Paragon
- Gourmet Market in Ngamwongwan
- Lotus's Rama I
