Green Revolution in Fresh Wholesale

Meaningfully addressing food waste means transforming the system at the source, including how much produce is unsold and discarded. On a social and community level, this can relieve malnutrition factors, hunger, and food insecurity; on a larger scale, it can reduce climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution.

As Woolworths Group launched Refresh:Food, BCG had the privilege of being a partner from the start, when the idea was still a spark. In all, BCG and Woolworths Group worked together over a nine-month incubation period, working to build the business, hire employees, perform testing iterations, fully develop coding, and ensure that live users on the platform were properly onboarded.

Woolworths Group’s ideal solution was anchored on three dimensions: 1) food waste reduction; 2) food insecurity reduction; and 3) GHG emission reduction, all in a manner that allowed the newly created business to be self-funding and not reliant on continued investment—driving profit to enable change.

Within the first eight weeks, BCG identified, tested, and validated a proof of concept and developed a roadmap for this new business model. The project benefited greatly from a strong team of diverse BCG X experts who could workshop and incubate a tech-led new business quickly, including business operators, designers, product managers, engineers, and strategy consultants. Together with BCG X, Woolworths Group identified customer frictions and latent needs, built prototypes for potential business concepts, and, finally, stood up and launched the company less than a year later.

In line with the profit-for-purpose business goals set, Refresh:Food supports both charitable donations and commercial transactions on the platform. Suppliers can sell excess produce to charities or businesses, or donate it for social causes. On the demand side, charities can use the app to access pockets of supply, place requests for produce they need, and benefit from donations. This mechanism simplifies matching supply with demand for both sides, creating a more efficient marketplace and ultimately reducing waste.

The new business offers three core solutions:

How Refresh:Food drives climate and societal impact and generates profit:

1. Reaching beyond the network. Many produce sellers need help accessing markets. Other factors affect sellers, including whether their fruits and vegetables meet specifications. “Ugly” (but still edible) produce is another opportunity (e.g., preserves, juice). Overall, Refresh:Food matches sellers to the right buyers for the right grade and right delivery window, with a certified logistics solution that can handle the commodity. In every aspect, Refresh:Food is fully digitizing an analog industry.
2. Moving produce from sellers to buyers quickly. Logistics is expensive and difficult to organize if an established partnership does not exist. Refresh:Food identifies, quotes, ensures capability (humidity and temperature control, storage management) and verifies that price and delivery windows are matched. This creates a network of large and long-tail providers in a digital, real-time manner.
3. Overseeing quality assurance. The Refresh:Food platform covers the selling/buying process end-to-end and ensures that all parties are able to receive the goods they ordered, at the negotiated price and with proper recourse if specs or weights are not correct.
4. Unlocking data-driven insights. This industry is data-poor, often making it difficult to understand and act on opportunities. Refresh:Food provides insights and connections to catalyze food-rescue innovation, investment, and regulatory change. This gives growers visibility over their key waste metrics and lets them share knowledge and build a wider network.