Yume Food: building a national surplus food marketplace

Yume Food built a national marketplace for surplus food, so that stock which would otherwise have gone to landfill was sold or donated instead. We were their development team from 2016, providing software development, scoping, CTO services and technical consultation across nearly a decade.

The problem

Food manufacturers end up with stock they cannot sell through their normal channels. A production overrun, a label change, a cancelled order, a date code too short for a supermarket's requirements. The food is perfectly good. The commercial route for it does not exist, so it goes to landfill, taking with it every litre of water and every kilowatt that went into producing it.

The obstacle was never willingness. It was that matching a pallet of surplus product to a buyer who wants exactly that, at a price that makes sense, inside the window before it expires, is a logistics and discovery problem. Done over the phone it is slower than the shelf life.

What a marketplace has to solve

Marketplaces are deceptively hard, and it is rarely the transaction that is difficult. Both sides have to be present before either side gets value, which means the software has to be useful to a seller on a day when no buyer turns up. Inventory is perishable, so listings expire and the system has to understand time rather than just store dates. Pricing is negotiated rather than fixed. And donation is a different flow from sale, with different obligations attached, running through the same catalogue.

That is why we settle the data layer before anything gets drawn on a screen. A marketplace whose listing model does not natively understand expiry, partial quantities and two different exit routes for the same stock will fight itself for the rest of its life. If you are weighing a build like this, we wrote up what marketplace development actually involves.

The outcome

Over the platform's life, Yume reported that it:

• Returned $30 million to Australian food manufacturers and businesses
• Redistributed 11.5 million kilograms of quality food
• Avoided 44 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions
• Saved 2.5 billion litres of embedded water

Nine years is the interesting number

The figures above are Yume's. The one that is ours is the duration. We were their development team from 2016 until the company wound up, which means this platform was extended, reshaped and maintained across nearly a decade of changing commercial reality rather than delivered once and handed over.

That is the case we would make for doing the strategy work first and for building API-first. A marketplace that has to survive nine years of new requirements is a different object from one that has to demo well, and the difference is decided in the first few months.

What we did on this engagement

Marketplace development, custom software development, scoping, CTO services and technical consultation. Yume was an accredited social enterprise, and this was one of several purpose-driven organisations we have built for.