In May 2019, Instock, one of the stakeholders of RUMORE Amsterdam, launched the first B2B marketplace against food waste . The Instock Market connects surpluses and imperfect food to the hospitality industry, mainly chefs, and will rescue up to 50,000 kilos of food each month! The products (mostly surplus food from supermarkets) are collected at the new food rescue center. This functions as a sorting center where everything is checked and put online. Chefs can order daily what is 'in stock'. The chefs are flexible and creative and make culinary creations from products that would otherwise have been thrown away. In addition, at least 30% of the rescued food goes to the foodbanks.
Instock was founded in June 2014 by four employees of the supermarket chain Albert Heijn (part of multinational Ahold Delhaize). They were confronted with food waste on a daily basis and decided to make a plan together to combat this. There are now three restaurants, a food truck and a product line. They saved almost 700,000 kilos of food.
In June 2019, the launch of the Instock Market was presented during the “We Make the City festival” in Amsterdam. The RUMORE project had its own stall at the festival, showing how collaboration and knowledge exchange between regional stakeholders and regions around Europe can be an incentive for innovation and for concrete new projects and collaborations.
The Instock Market is just one of the examples of projects the RUMORE Amsterdam stakeholder group work on. Other new projects are: a factory of ‘residual organic streams’; a pilot wetland crop field resulting in isolation board for building houses and an initiative to start a food cooperative in the region, creating a short supply chain for hospitals in the city. In addition, the group may turn into a ‘Circular Agri-food platform’ for long-term cooperation to support the creation of scalable examples of how a circular system can work. Also, there is a desire to hold on to the positive energy on the subject, reflected in the gatherings and in the bottom-up innovative ideas and projects the stakeholders have come up with.
The RUMORE Amsterdam stakeholder group consists of enthusiastic, motivated entrepreneurs and knowledge institutes working on circular economy. The main ambition of the group has been to generate new project ideas and build best practices together.
