Smith recently opened the UK’s first waste food supermarket, a vast facility in the northern city of Leeds stacked with tons of intercepted produce. The launch attracted huge donations, hordes of shoppers, and interest from government agents. “They could have shut us down quite easily,” says Smith after the inspectors leave. “But there were 500 people in the warehouse, including families and kids, with shopping trollies full of food.”
“I told them ‘you are going to have to work with us because otherwise all this food is going to landfill, and I’m going to tell people you are allowing it.'” Clashing with the authorities is routine for Smith, a chef turned waste food entrepreneur who has defied the law in building a global network of cafes that serve meals rescued from back alleys and trash cans. The Real Junk Food Project (RJFP) has launched over 120 eateries in seven countries from Israel to Australia, and the movement is gathering pace.
Building the network
In 2013, Smith returned from a spell of traveling abroad and became increasingly frustrated at the scale and impact of food waste. That same year, a wide-ranging report found that up to half of all the food produced globally — around two billion tons — goes to waste, taking a heavy toll on water consumption and carbon emissions.
The young chef resolved to make a difference, and began by opening a small cafe in his hometown Leeds. He used produce recovered from supermarket bins, and charged customers on a “pay as you feel” basis. The cafe rapidly gained popularity and word traveled fast. Several more sprang up in Leeds using the same model, and Smith started taking calls from abroad.
“People from all over the world got in touch to say ‘can we have one in our town?'” he recalls. “We shared our model like an open source concept and said how we did it. Next minute people were calling themselves the Real Junk Food Project in South Korea, Israel and South Africa… It just exploded.”
To read the full story, visit http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/05/world/food-waste-cafes-rjfp/.