New Perspective In Food Banking: Social Impact Center Model

We talked with Berat İnci, the chairman of the Board of Food Saving Association which was founded to bring a new approach to the work carried out on waste and food losses, about the perception that the association has developed and about its agenda. İnci says that they have established the Social Impact Center model as a concept store in order to operate food banking in Turkey right and to set an example to other institutions.

Let’s begin with the foundation story of Food Saving Association. From which need was this association born?

In 2007, as a team carrying out studies on waste and food losses, we were studying the advanced countries in this regard and trying to find out what our country lacks.
The most important outcome of the study was that in Turkey private businesses’ awareness being very low as well as the public’s.
In the beginning there were very few institutions and people who could say “We have waste and they are valuable”. When you examine countries like Holland, USA and Italy, you would see that they have been talking about this problem for 40-50 years. Naturally the awareness of them is very high. Moreover, they have not only talked but have made the solutions legally encouraged, they have taken deterrent measures and actions have been taken as well. On the other hand, Non-Governmental Organizations have developed their infrastructure and capacities in this regard with various supports. When a wasteful product is wanted to be donated, suitable tools to take this product, suitable areas to store it, and systems to make them meet the needy have been developed. Unfortunately, these issues were quite weak in our country. When we put these reasons together, our 3 main missions have emerged and we decided to establish the Food Saving Association within this structure. These missions can be listed as increasing communication and awareness in order to prevent waste and reduce the losses, improving the capacity and infrastructures of non-governmental organizations in this regard, and supporting the advocacy mission and legislative processes.

What kind of a picture is there in Turkey in the means of food waste?

When we look at the statistics on wastage and losses our country is among the emerging countries and thus, it has the characteristics of this category. For example, in developed countries, 55% waste occurs in domestic consumption, while in developing countries this rate is the opposite. So we’re losing the 55% of the food until it comes to our plate. According to 2014 figures, while the value of our total waste is 214 billion TL, today we see that this figure exceeds 300 billion TL. The saddest of these values is that approximately 90 billion TL of the total waste being suitable for human consumption. We bury 98% of these products in the ground, burn them and say “we have stored them regularly”. In fact, in some products such as tomatoes, it has become among the products that “we produce to throw away”. There are many reasons for this; starting with the agricultural production processes, including supply chain management and consumer spots includes very hard steps to manage. These are the steps that require expertise and cooperation at the point of waste management in many areas such as “Reducing at the source”, “Humanitarian Donation”, “Animal Consumption”, “Industrial Use”, “Recycling methods” and “Compost”. When we look at it, we saw that no company had a “Waste Management Department” and that by adding a “Destruction Budget” to their budgets for millions of liras every year, this problem is postponed for another year as if there weren’t enough problems already. For this reason, as GKTD, we have developed cooperation with Fazla Gıda, the only Turkish initiative chosen by the United Nations to be supported worldwide. While Fazla Gıda offers a 360-degree waste management system which is implemented for the first time in the world thanks to its digital infrastructure, GKTD carries out food banking development activities to deliver products suitable for humanitarian aid to those in need throughout the country. Thanks to this cooperation, we brought 12 million kilograms of products in 34 cities together with 325,000 needy people in two years.

What are the activities carried out by the association to prevent waste?
As Food Saving Association, we have three areas of activity. These are awareness, advocacy and food banking. In addition to being different, “sustainability” is a common point in all our activities that we realize and perform in these three areas. As an institution focused on reducing food waste in Turkey, we have been conducting advocacy, awareness and food banking activities which we believe in the sustainability of them, with the faith that all sectors should come together.
One of our projects led by awareness and advocacy is our project titled “Capacity Increase for Food Waste Prevention and Reduction in Turkey”, which was supported by the Civil Society Sector’s Civil Society Support Program’s Second Period of the EU Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and that we’ve undertaken as GKTD. As you know, it is a difficult process to bring together the private, public and civil society sectors in Turkey. Our aim in this project is to create a Legislation Proposal Report by gathering all sectors and creating an Advocacy strategy – Advocacy Handbook on preventing food loss and food waste. Another output of this project is to make inferences on waste map and waste management by conducting an Industrial Symbiosis Study in the service sector which is one of the sectors where food waste is most common. As part of this project, we held our first workshop in Istanbul on December 4, 2019.
In this workshop, the Draft Advocacy Hand Kit was shared and discussed with private, public and non-governmental representatives. In addition, the sectors that are positioned as producers and consumers talked about their problems in this respect. Such an environment had been an opportunity for many industry representatives who didn’t have time to listen to each other and for Turkey it was a nice step to start. We held our second workshop in Antalya on January 9, 2020. Our aim in the Antalya Workshop was to evaluate the food waste and industrial symbiosis opportunities in HORECA with the participation of all representatives of the food and service industry as well as the public and non-governmental sectors which are the shareholders of the reduction of waste consumption outside the home. The third and final event of this project will be the Ankara Closing Meeting that will be held on March 9, 2020. Our project has important outcomes for the future of Turkey and it  has drawn lot of interest. In this respect, we expect high participation to our Ankara Closing Meeting. In this meeting we will announce our report that we created within the scope of the project on the Advocacy Handbook and Policy Recommendations to the world.
We have volunteer activities that we carry out regularly every month within the framework of awareness and advocacy activities. Our volunteers consist of two different groups. One side is made up of our donators with whom we have worked together and have been the greatest support from the very beginning. First the Fazla Gıda team which is our biggest supporter, Ford Otosan team, one of our biggest supporters, who supported us the most on realizing our Social Impact Center dream as well as Migros and Metro teams, who are one of our biggest food donors come to our Social Impact Center regularly and work with us within the framework of our routine work. On the other hand, we have a volunteer team of university students. They are very enthusiastic about preventing food waste, saving food and delivering the food to the individuals in need. Seeing improvements in their approach to food waste in each volunteer activity we carry out together as well as feeling that energy shows us that we are in the right direction and make us very happy.

You have an innovative approach towards Food Banking. Can you tell us a bit about that?
There are many institutions that carry out food banking activities in Turkey. However, food banks unfortunately adopt the mistakes they see from each other or false facts and apply them in food banking activities. We, as an association, have found it our duty to develop food banking in Turkey as one of our reasons for establishment. In this context, we established the Social Impact Center model, which we mentioned earlier, as a concept market in order to carry out food banking in Turkey and to be an example to other institutions in this sense. Social Impact Center is a market, a project where we deal with all kinds of material and moral workloads that need to be dealt in a food bank, from finding donations to accepting goods, from purchasing goods to logistics and from determining those in need and to distributing the rescued food to those in need. In our opinion, food banking should not only deliver food to the individuals in need, but also should interact with these individuals. It should also raise awareness among individuals on food waste and waste management. As it is known, the smallest unit of the society is family and if we want to raise awareness about food waste, we should start with the individuals in the family. In our Social Impact Center model, we aim to create this effect. There are also developments that make us happy on this path where we want to create consumer awareness.
In addition to food banking, we are also responsible for waste management within. As you know, there is a need for consumables (bags, plastic bottles etc.) in food banking. However, such materials are both environmentally hazardous and not cost-effective. In order to prevent this, we focused on reducing the materials we use as well as providing individuals with fabric bags in our Social Impact Center model.

Save Your Food projects consists of more than one stage. What are the basic goals of it? 

The project will continue until April 2020. We aim to develop an advocacy strategy and advocacy kit to reduce food loss and waste. We would also like to create a report with legislative evaluation recommendations by making Gap Analysis in regulations on food donation. Another aim is to examine the industrial symbiosis possibilities in HORECAs to create circular economy outputs. As a result, we want to create a Network that will bring all stakeholders who are interested in reducing and preventing food waste together around this goal.

How was Antalya Workshop? What were the prominent topics of the panels on reducing the food waste that occurs in HORECAs?

Antalya Workshop started with the presentation of both our association and our project to the participants by Berat İnci, the Chairman of the Board of Directors of GKTD. Food Saving Association Chairman Berat İNCİ said: “We are all responsible for the fire in Australia! As long as we continue to throw tomato peels in the trash, we will continue to experience disasters based on human climate change.” İNCİ emphasized that the number of people below the hunger and poverty line in Turkey exceeds 20 million and that food waste in Turkey is worth 300 billion TL.
In this workshop, the thing that made us happy the most as an association was that we shared many things that we’ve been defending about food waste since the beginning. This is such a good thing because it was the proof that the sectors can now begin to walk together towards a common point.
As GKTD, we are preparing a feasibility study based on the investigation of industrial symbiosis relationships that can enable the evaluation of waste in out-of-home consumption as well as the creation of circular economic outcomes within the scope of Save Your Food project. In the study conducted by the Food Saving Association with GTE’s technical consultancy, a model approach that will deeply affect the country’s economy is developed with concepts such as waste recycling, symbiosis and circular economy. After the panels at the workshop, a study on industrial symbiosis was conducted with the participants accompanied by GTE. It has been a very productive workshop and study for us.