Building technology for a sustainable future with less than 0,5% of food waste
Tl;dr: We are revolutionising the grocery shopping experience with technology and a new value chain. Join us in making an impact on society!
Did you know that on a global scale, one-third of all food is wasted? In Norway, each one of us wastes almost 43 kilos of food each year. Food production, habits and consumption is a huge environmental issue.
We care about global sustainability goals
Kolonial.no is committed to the UN sustainability goals, and particularly those related to sustainable production and consumption. Even if substantial environmental impact from food occurs in the production phase (agriculture, food processing), households influence this impact through their dietary choices and habits. Our customers already buy 70% more fruit and vegetables than the average customer in physical stores — a sign that people change habits if it’s convenient for them. This consequently affects the environment through food-related energy consumption and waste generation.
UN Sustainability Goal number 12.3 hits particularly close to home for us at Kolonial.no:
12.3 By 2030, halve per capita global food waste at the retail and consumer levels and reduce food losses along production and supply chains, including post-harvest losses.
The goal is not only focusing on what industry and business can do to support this development but what the consumer can do as well. In Norway, we waste close to 43kg food per person each year and achieving a 50% reduction is something we aim for way sooner than 2030.
Fundamental challenges with the existing grocery value chain
The truth is that traditional grocery stores are badly designed to reduce food waste. It can be really tricky to predict demand at individual locations. Products are often shelved at the wrong temperature, products get squeezed and touched by multiple customers, or they are placed on the shelf for too long. The point is — the whole grocery system needs to be re-done if we’re going to be serious about sustainability.
Our end-to-end holistic approach that rethinks how food reaches customers
Sustainable production means doing more with fewer resources. We are therefore challenging and changing the norms of the grocery industry by creating a whole new value chain for purchasing, picking, packing and distribution. Our methods are fundamentally different from what is physically possible in a store, putting us in a unique position to address the problem holistically.
We have known for some time that purchasing groceries online is one step for customers in their journey to a more sustainable lifestyle. Customers can plan their meals in advance making effective choices, they don’t impulse shop at the store, or they reduce the number of car trips to the grocery store each week.
Having an online grocery store with rich customer order data can directly support us in re-designing and building a new value chain. We can, as an example, predict days in advance how much we expect to sell across the store. Predicting what we sell, how much, and when has, in less than a year, halved our food waste. Our goal for this year is to reduce our food waste to 0,5%, something we are quite close to. We will keep pushing to get closer to 0%.
The categories of food with the highest proportions of food waste are baked goods (22%), vegetables (22%) and meat (10%). In our warehouse, we store and pack fruit and vegetables under perfect temperatures for them, not for retail store customers. For bread, all orders are placed ahead of time, so our in-house bakery only bakes bread after it’s been ordered. So not only is our bread always fresh, our bread waste is nearly zero.
Because we have one large warehouse and not many small stores, we have an extremely fast turnover of our products — meaning products are in the warehouse often for just a couple of hours rather than days before they are delivered to our customers. Our logistics guarantees fresher food with longer shelf life, and more sustainable value chain with less waste.
We own and develop our entire tech and data-platform ourselves — meaning that we design and code everything from the customer experience on the web, app and mobile to robots, neural network and infrastructure for packing and distributions of goods all the way home to our customers. Having full control over our technology is really starting to pay off in our mission to build a product that takes into consideration sustainable consumption and production that both serves our customers and society.
Happy, but not satisfied
While we are happy with the results we’ve achieved so far, we believe we have so much more to do in creating the world’s most efficient and sustainable retail system: Other efforts we are working on:
- Building a shopping experience that guides and encourages our customers to develop more sustainable purchasing habits
- Experimenting with how we can reduce the use of plastics in our packing and distribution of groceries — such as using cardboard boxes
- Adding electric vehicles to our highly efficient distribution network
- Recycling more plastic bottles for our customers compared with any other grocery store nationwide in collaboration with Infinitum
- Having agreements with local charities and partners that receive our expired-on-date food, which can still be eaten by people in their communities
And more… Through smart work, passionate customer focus and our own technology we make a difference in the lives of thousands of customers and change society for the better.
We continuously look for people to join our mission and encourage you to read more about our open jobs, or reach out to us directly with any question you might have about technology, sustainability or a career at Kolonial.no.
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A Medium story by Sabrina, Tech Recruiter at Kolonial.no
sabrina@kolonial.no / LinkedIn
kolonial.no/tech
