At Greenspoon, we work really hard on reducing food waste. It’s one of the major problems contributing to climate change with 8% of greenhouse gasses coming from rotting food (yes, even though it composts, it also emits a load of carbon!). And it’s almost unbelievable that there is also a hunger problem: 32% of Kenyans face hunger or food insecurity. What a tragedy. In any case, at Greenspoon we’re allergic to waste! We absolutely hate putting things back into the world which could otherwise be used.
Since we started with fruit and veg, as you can imagine there is greater potential for waste because a good piece of fresh produce has quite a short shelf life. We wondered what to do with anything that remained unsold at the end of the day, and we soon came into contact with a local orphanage in Regen.
The orphanage is home to 80 lovely children, looked after by a team of dedicated members of the community. As you can imagine, finding funding for these kind of projects is not always easy, but we are doing what we can to help. Every few days, we deliver fresh fruit & veg to the orphanage to help feed the children, and we hope that by providing quite a variety of produce, that we can help with their nutrition and general health. As you all know I love to bang on about the 30 different fruits and veggies you should eat per week to ensure great gut health! We like to try and apply this to the produce we take to the kids too.
For any fruit and veg that is beyond its best, we save this to give to Insectipro which is a fantastic farm in Tigoni. The waste product goes to their black soldier fly project, which is turning out to be one of the most efficient ways to grow protein. The flies eat almost anything and then turn into high-protein insects which are perfect for animal feed – pigs, pets, cows, and more, all benefit from BSF. On the same farm, they are growing the cricket snacks (food of the future?!) that we sell on Greenspoon – a delicious, crunchy snack that is grown sustainably and with very few inputs. You should try them! 😉
Every now and then, we have frozen meat products that are getting too close to their best-before-date for us to sell to you. Most of these are also donated to the orphanage, and some come in handy for our office nyama choma which happens once a month at our warehouse. The monthly nyama choma is a moment for us to get together and catch up, and of course, we also play team-building games (Adrian is the ring leader in this department!). Sometimes it gets a bit out of control which is why you’ll never see anything on social media!!!
