Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to pay tribute to Katy Barfield, awarded an Order of Australia recently for service to business and the environment, specifically for years tackling food waste. Katy's eureka moment came when she and her partner were running a bar in Melbourne. As she watched the chef turf out the contents of the fridge at closing time, she imagined this happening in restaurants right around the country. Katy spent seven years as the CEO of food rescue organisation SecondBite and realised that technology could tackle the scale of waste far more efficiently than building more warehouses. So the social enterprise Yume was born.

Manufacturers use the Yume platform to sell surplus food. Any unsold food is given to charities chosen by the manufacturers. Yume is a triple-bottom-line winner: a financial win for the manufacturers; a win for the environment; and, importantly, an obvious win for the community, with many, many thousands of meals delivered to the most vulnerable in our community. Last year alone, Yume diverted nearly five million tonnes of food from going to waste, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. As Katy says, she is looking forward to the phrase 'let's Yume that' becoming part of the business conversation.

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