Gullspång Re:food, a subsidiary of Stockholm-based investment group Gullspång Invest, is investing in Swedish food waste reducing e- commerce platform, Matsmart-Motatos, which helps tackle food waste by selling surplus food online.

Gullspång Re:food – which has also invested in the Swedish oat milk makter Oatly and Swedish low-fat ice cream brand Nick’s – has been following Matsmart-Motatos since it was established in 2015. 

Matsmart-Motatos is one of the first companies to successfully transform food waste into new revenue streams at a meaningful scale.

The company, one of the fastest-growing in the Nordics, takes care of food that otherwise would have been wasted from producers and sells it to consumers through its e-commerce platform. 

This allows consumers to buy food that otherwise would have gone to waste at affordable prices while producers make money by reducing their food waste.

Moving toward a circular economy
Food waste along the supply chain is one of the most pressing challenges of todays food system. The economic loss of food waste equals US$1.15 trillion each year with land use equal to the size of China. 

Solutions to reform todays linear food supply chains into more circular models can yield tremendous environmental, social, and financial returns, notes Gullspång Re:food.

It says that this investment aligns with one of the company’s key investment themes aimed at transforming linear and wasteful supply chains into circular resource-efficient models that minimize lost nutrients, materials, and energy.

The newly formed subsidiary Gullspång Re:food exclusively invests in solutions seeking to reform the food system into a sustainable and resilient state. 

Re:foods investment themes are circular supply chains, healthy diets, regenerative farming, and alternative proteins and fats.

Earlier this month, new UN research conducted to support global efforts to halve food waste by 2030 revealed that an estimated 931 million metric tons of food, or 17 percent of total food available to consumers in 2019, went into the waste bins of households, retailers, restaurants and other food services.

Tackling food waste
At the beginning of March, the UK campaign Food Waste Action Week focused on household food waste’s impact on climate change. 

Meanwhile, tackling food waste plays a significant part in Wageningen University & Research (WUR)’s ReThink Protein Challenge, wher students are competing to find more sustainable solutions for alternative proteins.