UGLY IS STILL GOOD | Steps to reduce food waste
UGLY IS STILL GOOD | Steps to reduce food waste
An island with endless food supply generously donated from everyone over the world. We are proud to say that we are also standing right behind US and China in World Rankings – for our greenhouse gas emissions! (8% of annual greenhouse gas emissions) Obviously this is not an actual place, thankfully, but this is what food waste will be as a country.
As part of a campaign called Food Unfiltered carried out by students from Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) the students conducted a survey of 243 Singaporeans with ages from 20 to 59 in a year. Results from the survey revealed 68.1% of respondents refused to buy ugly food—items that are defined as “edible fresh fruits and vegetables with slight discoloration, bruising or misshapenness.”
In this place we call home, it is a pity that many of us are unable to look past the bruises and deficiencies – in our food. And because of this, we find ourselves being a lethal culprit of climate change.
That decent looking guy you see on tinder has a 100/100 personality too!
No doubt, food waste is a gargantuan problem to tackle initially but first, we need to understand why 800,000 tonnes of food are wasted a year, (aside from the supposed 2 bowls of rice worth per pax thrown away from the consumer end), the numbers just does not seem to add up. This problem can be analysed in 2 parts;
Looking at developing nations, as much as consumers value food, they are less equipped with the technologies to deal with wastage especially in the manufacturing processes.
On the other hand, in developed nations like our sunny island, consumers tend to waste food due to the sheer abundance of supply and disconnection from the source of the supplies.
What can we do then? (in Singapore)
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Start from your own kitchen.
The next time you visit a supermarket, grab an apple, when your eye catches sight of a redder looking apple, remind yourself that the shape, size, colour does not matter, then place the apple into your basket. Perhaps only when we start consciously making such decisions will we change the way we view our food.
2. Education
Innately as human beings, the norm we know today is constructed from memories we have as a child. A quick look at this article on ‘How Do Toys Affect A Child’s Self-Image, View of Society?’ https://wdet.org/posts/2017/05/22/85212-how-do-toys-affect-a-childs-self-image-view-of-society/,
“Everything they interact with teaches them what the world is like…And we know that if things are familiar, we’re more comfortable with them” – Christia Spears Brown, Ph.D. psychologist.
If you have kids, or younger cousins for that matter, consider changing up the toys in their little playpen. As we slowly shed light onto the importance of toys in educating our young, we can teach them to accept that misshapen, imperfect food is perfectly fine.
3. Influence
Even if you do not have a follower count of thousands on instagram, by posting a picture of your bruised food product and then with the power of some captions,
#uglybutgood #isupportuglyfood #FightFoodWaste #uglyfruitisbeautiful #eatugly
our friends will be exposed to seeing more of these imperfect produces. As we register more of such images, our brains can normalise the idea of having less-than-perfect products in our baskets. Another great idea can be to organise cooking sessions with your friends, as you bond over the old times and good food, you can introduce them to your food pantry. Then the next step would be to have faith that your friends will join you in your quest to support ugly foods too!
4. Change the way you get your food! (for businesses)
If you have an FnB business and would like to do your part in reducing food wastage, do sign up for our phone application. Here, you can make orders and bid for your orders at heavily discounted rates. Most importantly, these food stocks are part of TreeDots which come from oversupply, off-spec and close to expiry products and would have been completely wasted if not for YOU.
Our new app is operationally ready on both
iOS: https://apps.apple.com/sg/app/treedots/id1448811993
and
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thetreedots&hl=en.
Download now and get access to a whole bunch of fresh ingredients, the sustainable way. Alternatively, contact us HERE for more details!
“LOVE FOOD, FIGHT WASTE” always.
5 Money-Saving Tips For All F&B Businesses
5 Money-Saving Tips For All F&B Businesses
Let’s face it: running an F&B business isn’t a walk in the park. Far from it, in fact. Oftentimes, we gain money-saving tips and knowledge through personal trial and error.
Most of the time, it feels like you’re fighting a multi-headed monster: brainstorming new menu items, monitoring your competitors, training new staff, marketing your restaurant…you name it.
By this point, the last thing you want on your plate (heh) is worrying about how you’re going to pay next month’s bills.
Whether you own a catering business or is the proud founder of a swanky Clarke Quay bar, here are 5 tips you can use to cut down on business costs (aka more profit for you, yay!):
1) Daily Inventory: Make It A Habit
General rule of thumb (or just common sense, really): don’t buy more than you need.
Running low on supplies and need to know exactly how much ingredients to order? Your trusty inventory list should give you all the answers you need.
Now, most F&B places probably review their inventory on a weekly basis.
We suggest you turn this into a daily routine. Having more data on which menu item is popular on which days of the week, or which produce is used up quickly every day will help you predict – with greater accuracy – how much of what you should order per week.
With our TreeDots’ app, you can easily analyse your daily inventory and predict customers’ behaviours and preferences so you always have the right ingredients on hand. Our platform lets you track the items you ordered in one glance, which lets you compare it against the inventory wasted.
Give us a shout via our contact form, and we’ll be there to onboard you onto the app.
Say goodbye to food spoilage and money going down the drain!
2) Slim Down Your Menu
More menu items = more variety = more customers, right?
Not necessarily so.
Having a large menu means you have to buy even more ingredients.
When a dish fails to sell (touch wood), the ingredients you bought specially for it typically end up in the bin.
Conversely, with a focused menu, you kill two birds with one stone: One, food wastage is cut down. Second, you lose less money. You can even try creating different dishes using the same few ingredients to ensure lesser wastage (hint hint)!
Interestingly, research has also shown that customers typically don’t like menus that are too big, as it complicates their decision-making process. In fact, most said their ideal menu size has not more than 7 starters, 10 mains and 7 desserts.
3) Get Those Creative Juices Flowing
Say you took our suggestion and is culling the less popular menu items. However, you now find yourself with tons of unused produce.
Don’t, for goodness’ sake, discard them – unless you are fine with throwing months of earnings away.
Take those seemingly random ingredients and transform them into “house specials” instead. Always wanted to deconstruct eggs benedict, serve it on a bed of dehydrated hash brown flakes and garnish it with mushroom-tofu foam? Now’s the time to let your creativity run wild.
Who knows, it just might become the restaurant’s next signature dish.
4) Go Seasonal
Produce that are in-season often taste better + retail at lower prices. Talk about win-win!
In fact, try combining the money-saving tips we taught you in (3) with this pointer. Keep your customers on their toes as they anticipate your next culinary invention – and that’s a good thing in our book.
5) Care Less About Aesthetics
Food for thought: why place so much emphasis on how ingredients look when we ultimately transform them into something completely different anyway?
After all, beauty is beyond skin deep. A chicken that has one or two bruises tastes the same as a spotless one.
For those who don’t discriminate against ingredients on the sole basis of appearance, you’re in luck!
Here at TreeDots, we offer money-saving tips in the form of:
- Premium-quality ingredients (be it vegetables, meat, seafood, etc)
- For a fraction of the price (up to 50% off selected items).
Interested in cutting down the costs of running your restaurant, or know a friend who is? Drop us a message and let’s figure out how we can work together!
Guaranteed fresh chickens that you can afford
Guaranteed fresh chickens that you can afford
What’s fresh? It sure isn’t any secret that anything fresh is good for you, but just as any other thrifty Singaporean, we often fear the price tags fresh products usually bring along with it when compared to their frozen counterparts. After all, a chicken is just chicken be it in a frozen block or a fresh slab of meat. One thing that many are not aware of is that here at TreeDots, we can give you prices of FRESH chickens just as low as those icy poultry.
1. Affordable Fresh Chickens
How can we possibly give you such low prices? Due to suppliers having to meet a steady supply, they make use of machines to expedite the processes which result in tonnes of broken bones, bruised chickens. Many of which will not find themselves on shelves, bypassing the plates into bins. Yet, they have perfectly tender meat locked inside this ‘ugly’ facade. The fresh chickens we have here would not pinch at your wallets, and are most definitely a great snatch!
2. Glazing
What is glazing you may ask? Essentially, glazing = ice. (= extra weight)
Did you know that the weight of the frozen chicken you are purchasing is inclusive of this glazing. This means that the expected weight loss after thawing the item will be close to 30%
… hence a pack of 10kg chicken melts into 7kg…
If you are the kind of person that likes to get the best deal out of what you are paying for, I am sure you wouldn’t want to be short-changed.
3. Better Taste
As Gordon Ramsay claims, [he] can taste the difference between fresh and raw. For those who are more particular with the taste of their chickens, often the fresh chicken will have a juicier bite as compared to its frozen counterparts. Why is this so?
Simple biology knowledge tell us that freezing causes the liquid content within the product to expand and burst cells. This leads to a loss of moisture after thawing, leaving behind a stringy texture. So if you would like to have some of that tender, delectable chicken wing blessing your palettes, give fresh chickens a shot!
Some people might argue that they had froze their fresh chickens before and it still tastes delectable. Well, let’s just say Singapore’s frozen chickens mainly come from South American regions and it takes around 45 days to ship it here – safety is definitely not an issue since it is frozen, but we are not that sure if it will still taste the same!
4. The Environment
Finally, purchasing from the TreeDots will be your vote of confidence for the environment. On average, close to 5000 chickens are thrown away DAILY as they simply do not reach the high standards of businesses. Unfortunately, this is just a conservative number. There is simply too much wastage!
(imagine the 40 000 plates of chicken rice that could have been whipped up)
Refering to this earlier post https://www.thetreedots.com/2018/10/25/ugly-fresh-chickens/, Nicholas tells us more of this wastage and how our efforts here at TreeDots are attempting to reduce this problem.
By purchasing these fresh chickens from us, you will be doing your part to prevent these (slightly injured, slightly off-sized) imperfect yet perfectly fine on the plate, fresh chickens from landing in the bin.
With these perks, what are you waiting for. Give us a shout here if you would like to find out more about how we can move some products together!
Are there ugly fresh chickens?
Are there ugly fresh chickens?
We have all heard about how fruits and vegetables are being wasted due to cosmetic filtering, but do you know fresh chickens undergo the same treatment as well? A life reared to ultimately be killed for food is already horrible, now it is killed to be thrown?
Simply unthinkable.
Yet it is happening. Thousands of fresh chickens are being thrown away on a daily basis because they do not hit the requirements to be models on the display freezers. Here is a list of why fresh chickens get thrown away:
1. Sizing
Of course, the most obvious one. Just like all living things, an average number of days is needed to grow a chicken to a certain size. The most popular sizing – 1.2kg chickens – takes about 32 days to grow. However, just like all living things, not all chickens grow to 1.2kg in 32 days. Some grow bigger, some are still just tiny. Regardless, these chickens are usually thrown away since they are too small or big to be displayed on retail shelves. “They would stand out like a sore thumb amidst all the 1.2kg”.
Besides, automated machines these days are made to only process chickens of a certain sizing. In fact, one of the companies we met recently only take in chickens that are 1.75kg (yes, that precise) because their automated chicken cutter can only take that size.
2. Injuries
Alright, slaughtering is not a pretty process guys. The slaughterhouses work tirelessly, and chickens knowing that they are going to be killed won’t just sit there. Loads of knocking around the cages when idling, and workers have to hold them down sometimes. At times, these struggles and relatively forceful handling do result in bruises and broken bones.
Have you ever seen a displayed fresh chicken with such injuries? No? Well, point proven.
3. Anomalies
Chickens, like all other living things, will have deformed parts sometimes. Uneven sizing of wings, overgrown thighs, etc. Although genetic selection, and relatively better farming conditions have reduced the chances of deformities from happening, they will still happen. However, we have checked with chefs and slaughterhouses, such deformities are never harmful (cancerous/bacterial growth is another thing altogether). These chickens are definitely still more than fit enough for consumption!
4. Over-stocking/production
Remember when we said there is a chance for the fresh chickens to not come out the sizing they want despite rearing for a certain duration? What do you think these farmers/slaughterhouses will do to prevent themselves from breaching their contracted volume of sized chickens?
Rear more of course! If I need to supply 10,000 1.2kg fresh chickens a day, I will just simply rear 15,000 1.2kg fresh chickens in case some of them fall short or over the sizing. This just means more is being produced than required. Doesn’t take a genius to know what happens to those over produced ones.
5. Storage Issues
I know some of you are thinking, since there are people out there who will use these fresh chickens, and overproduced chickens can still be the right size – why not just store it and sell it after?
Well, you will be right if fresh chickens don’t come in on a daily basis. There is almost no storage for fresh chickens as it will then be considered fresh frozen which is lower in value. Also, storage isn’t exactly a very cheap thing either. Higher cost, and lower margins? Who will be willing to undertake this?
We have been working with various poultry slaughterhouses to help them re-distribute these fresh chickens. As our favourite saying goes – one man’s meat is another man’s poison – there is always a use for undersized/oversized chickens out there in the market. For injured and deformed chickens, we have also managed to process and re-distribute them accordingly.
By doing so, we managed to help businesses increase their margins by allowing them to procure cheap fresh chickens at almost 50% discount from their usual prices (whoopie!) and saving them from the bin at the same time. Slaughterhouses and farms are happy too since they have us to take care of their logistics! Doing the same thing as what they always have been but earning extra income, these farms and slaughterhouses are more than happy.
Interested to find out more or know someone who might be? Simply hit us up here or drop us a comment to see what we can do for you!
4 Reasons TreeDots had to remove the Vege Box
4 Reasons TreeDots had to remove the Vege Box
Saying goodbye is always tough, but sometimes it has to be done. The “Adopt a Vege Box” initiative was without a doubt one of the first few services that we had started as a weapon against edible food waste. Ugly vegetables sourced from our suppliers packed into a box and delivered to our adopters every Friday, sounds like a great plan!
Or maybe not. Here are some reasons that we have learnt along our journey to force us to pause this product for the time being:
1. Lack of Customers
2. Mismatch in Expectations
3. Slow response time from sellers
4. Lack of sufficient resources
Burger Beer Bistro x TreeDots: Mouthwatering Goodness
Burger Beer Bistro x TreeDots: Mouthwatering Goodness
Today we’re back with another piece on our Buyer’s Feature series! In this series, we feature our close partners, who form part of Singapore’s community of food waste warriors.
Mmm…burgers!
Up next in our Buyer’s Feature series, we cast the spotlight on our favourite burger bar! B3 (short for Burger Beer Bistro) serves up delectable western dishes and fine beer with an environmental twist!
Previously on our Buyer’s Feature series: Ugly Food x Treedots – A Perfect Pear-ing
As their supplier for poultry and fresh produce, we are delighted to be able to feature their efforts in combating food waste on our blog.
What’s Brewin’ at B3?
Located at SMU, B3 caters to diners in our heartlands. With burgers, pasta and an ambience that’s rockin’ some incredible vibes, B3 is a favourite among SMU students and staff.
Calling avid football fans, for B3 might just become your new turf. B3 screens live football matches for its customers and has even got special promotions during this World Cup season.
We’re here today with Head Chef Don, who proudly shares that all their dishes are all done in-house and made from scratch!
Don’t their burgers look mouthwatering? Their Sawadee and Heart Attack Burgers are their bestsellers!
B3’s Bold ideas
A restaurant’s meals are their literal bread and butter. And Head Chef Don knows what’s best for his customers. To him, it is of high importance that he does not compromise on the quality of his ingredients. In that case, how is working with TreeDots an ideal choice for him? After all, we deal with food waste, right?
Read: 4 Types of TreeDots Products To Fall In Love With
It is perfectly understandable when other restaurants are hesitant on the idea of obtaining produce from the TreeDots marketplace- even those of perfect quality! This is because there is still a strong stigma surrounding food items that are bound for the trash.
However, Don prefers to let the food speak for itself.
He rejects food items that are of poor quality or have gone bad, and our products definitely do not fall under this list.
That’s right! Did you know that our products are even fresher than those sold at your supermarkets? This is because we obtain them directly from importers and suppliers! We get our hands on the food months before they reach our local stores.
Read: Top 5 Reasons Why Businesses Buy From TreeDots
As a frequent buyer of frozen poultry, B3 quells the notion that frozen goods are ‘less unhealthy’. The bad rap that frozen foods often get are in fact unfounded for.
Advanced freezing techniques used today are able to preserve the taste and texture of our beloved food products.
Sometimes, they are even better than fresh food.
Here at TreeDots, we carry a wide variety of items that range from fresh produce to frozen poultry and seafood. And fret not, for we are able to vouch for the quality of our products!
We obtain all our food items from importers and distributors that are too, suppliers to our local supermarkets, grocery stores and F&B outlets.
Boundless Benefits
When asked about B3’s partnership with TreeDots, Don has no regrets. It wasn’t hard to make the switch from conventional suppliers to one like TreeDots. To him, it was a win-win situation.
Getting his ingredients of equal or better quality at significantly lower prices sounded like a good deal. Don says that, “since we started getting our food products from TreeDots, it has really lightened our cost by a lot. In the F&B industry, what matters most is that you always control your cost.”
To add on to that, TreeDots’ social cause appeals very much to them. B3 stands as a restaurant with a green mission, and reducing food waste definitely aligns with their goals to go green.
Fancy a meal at an eco-conscious place? B3 at SMU awaits!