Tackling food waste using innovative technology

What exact­ly does Order­ly do?

We’re a 13-year-old, pio­neer­ing, sus­tain­abil­i­ty-first sup­ply chain tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny based in Der­by. We improve dig­i­tal order and stock man­age­ment tools that reduce food waste for UK busi­ness­es, while increas­ing their prof­it. Busi­ness­es world­wide use our solu­tions, with Order­ly Score espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar. It acts as a dig­i­tal store assis­tant, using arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and data sources, includ­ing point-of-sale, labour, inven­to­ry and CCTV, to offer real-time, store-lev­el insights for food and bev­er­age oper­a­tors so they can make more sus­tain­able and prof­itable deci­sions.

Get­ting these insights to the right staff mem­ber at the right time empow­ers a business’s sus­tain­abil­i­ty mis­sion. It helps peo­ple under­stand that lit­tle deci­sions every day can make a mas­sive dif­fer­ence over­all. Think about the car­bon sav­ings cof­fee chains with tens of thou­sands of stores could make if they didn’t buy that extra bot­tle of milk for every loca­tion that has gone off by the end of the day.

How much of an issue is food waste?

Food waste is arguably the dumb­est prob­lem glob­al­ly: why would you buy more food than you need as an enter­prise, nev­er mind a con­sumer? There are already tools to stop, for exam­ple, hun­dreds of sand­wich­es end­ing up in the bin at the end of the day at a super­mar­ket. Order­ly is tak­ing that fur­ther and is per­fect­ly placed to help achieve the Unit­ed Nations’ Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment Goal 12.3: to halve food waste by 2030.

The eco­nom­ic fall­out from the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic will plunge an addi­tion­al half a bil­lion peo­ple — 8% of the glob­al pop­u­la­tion — into pover­ty. This fig­ure is on top of the 700 mil­lion peo­ple (10%) already liv­ing in extreme pover­ty with­out access to the most basic needs, includ­ing health, edu­ca­tion, water and san­i­ta­tion.

How waste­ful is the UK food and bev­er­age indus­try?

The UK has been called a glob­al leader in tack­ling food waste, with total food waste lev­els falling by 480,000 tonnes between 2015 and 2018, accord­ing to WRAP — a reduc­tion of 7% per per­son. While con­sumer cam­paigns have had an impact, much of the change is down to some seri­ous pledges from the gov­ern­ment, which has a goal to reduce food waste by 20% by 2025. While UK house­holds still waste 4.5 mil­lion tonnes of food every year, large busi­ness­es have been tasked with set­ting a food waste reduc­tion tar­get for their UK oper­a­tions.

At Order­ly, we use var­i­ous data sources to show how cus­tomers’ sup­ply chains are work­ing — for bet­ter or worse. A busi­ness might think it is doing well because it has halved food waste in two years, but that could still be five times worse than the aver­age.

Are busi­ness lead­ers’ mind­sets around food waste chang­ing?

For sure. We start­ed Order­ly Score about two years ago; as soon as we engage with lead­ers, they under­stand the many ben­e­fits of hav­ing real-time insights at their fin­ger­tips. Con­nect­ing com­pa­nies, sup­ply chains and peo­ple is now crit­i­cal. Our insights, which are gath­ered from a wide range of cus­tomer data sources, reveal what’s real­ly hap­pen­ing.

Con­nect­ing sup­ply chains to enable cir­cu­lar economies is increas­ing­ly essen­tial and facil­i­tat­ed by Orderly’s solu­tions. For exam­ple, if some milk at the super­mar­ket is about to expire, it can be moved to a restau­rant using our plat­form. Before the pan­dem­ic, this was com­plete­ly unheard of — no one even thought about it. But things have changed.

You moved to the CEO role in Jan­u­ary 2020 – what have you learned?

There have been mas­sive changes and shocks in sup­ply chains, which are ongo­ing. At the start of the pan­dem­ic, it made my life as CEO of a ser­vice provider very dif­fi­cult because it was our job to keep the wheels turn­ing. When lots of quick-ser­vice retail­ers went qui­et due to the lock­downs world­wide, gro­cery sales went through the ceil­ing.

With Mor­risons, in only six days we man­aged to unlock food that could poten­tial­ly have gone to waste in ware­hous­es and launch food box­es for the NHS, peo­ple who were shield­ing and Mor­risons cus­tomers. This agili­ty cre­at­ed anoth­er route to mar­ket — direct to con­sumers’ doors — and may not have been pos­si­ble to imple­ment so quick­ly with a less respon­sive tech sup­pli­er. Hav­ing a smart strate­gic part­ner with a sus­tain­abil­i­ty-first mind­set will enable busi­ness­es to rebuild quick­ly after the pan­dem­ic and bet­ter man­age the planet’s resources.

To find out more about how Order­ly can help you tack­le sup­ply chain waste, vis­it orderly.io

Pro­mot­ed by Order­ly