She’s witnessed millions of tonnes of surplus edible food carelessly thrown into landfill despite being more than good enough to eat.
As a former bar owner, Barfield also knows how delicious food – fruit, vegetables, beef, seafood, chicken or chocolate – can end up in the bin at any stage of the supply chain.
To help try and slow this epidemic, she started a lucrative Australian-first business Yume out of intercepting and selling this fresh food.
Barfield, the founder of surplus food platform Yume, told 9news.com.au her lightbulb moment came while running a cosy bar in Melbourne’s inner-city.
“I started my ‘aha’ moment in the industry when I owned a little bar in Melbourne going back 22 years called the Bug Bar in Little Bourke Street,” she explained.
“I watched my chef literally put food from the fridge that was untouched into the bin.
“I remember thinking, if you times that by 45,000 – or 80,000 now – that’s a phenomenal amount of food.”
Yume takes perfectly good food at the supplier level before it goes to waste, whether it be because of a cancelled order, imperfect shape or wrong packaging.
It then sells these pallets of food to restaurants, catering companies, cafes or other venues for a fraction of the cost.
For example, chicken breasts which are $13/kg at wholesale price are just $5/kg with Yume.
Barfield – who is also the co-founder of food rescue group Second Bite – said a staggering 42 per cent of Australia’s annual food waste actually happens before it even reaches supermarket shelves.
“If you stuck the pallets of food that go to waste on top of each other every day, it would 2.8 times the height of Mount Everest,” she explained.
“It’s absolutely enormous. It’s more than anyone could ever imagine.”
When Barfield tells friends, family or clients this sobering statistic, she calls it the “jaw drop moment”.
“That’s every day,” she added. “And that’s just in Australia.”
So far, Yume has saved 10 million kilograms of surplus food from supermarkets and manufacturers and Barfield is now looking to target hospitality venues.
David Youl, the co-founder of popular Mexican restaurant Fonda, has worked with Comedia Providore to purchase rice and tortilla wraps from Yume.
Youl focuses on reducing food waste at the point of plating up in restaurants too.
This includes mindful menu curation and not over-ordering.
“There [could be] a shift to a mindset where when things are sold out, they’re sold out,” Youl said.
“Like an airline seat or a hotel room – that would minimise waste there.”
Youl’s restaurants have previously bought beef mince from Yume, which was repurposed into bolognese sauce.
“It was a high-quality product, it just had a shorter shelf-life and needed to be used,” he said.
Heading into Easter, Youl said a staggering amount of chocolate goes to waste simply because they’re shaped like bunnies.
“Chocolate price worldwide is going through the roof and there’ll be a surplus of dairy milk chocolate in April,” he said.
“I’ve seen Easter eggs and things like that on Yume that go somewhere.”
Barfield wants to work with more and more people like Youl to bring food rescue to the masses and reduce Australia’s food waste footprint.
“We are working through a logistics solution to bring it to all of those 80,000 restaurants and cafes across Australia, starting in Melbourne and then rolling it out,” she said.
“And this hasn’t been done before, it really is an Australian first, which is exciting.”
