OzHarvest: From One Yellow Van to a Global Food Waste Movement

Back in 2004, Ronni Kahn AO was working as an event planner in Sydney. After each event, she was dismayed by the quantities of perfectly good (and good tasting!) food being thrown away. Rather than accept the waste as inevitable, she decided to do something about it. With one yellow van, Kahn began collecting the surplus food and delivering it to local charities. More than two decades later, that small effort has grown into OzHarvest, a whole-system approach to food waste built around four interconnected pillars: feed, educate, innovate, and advocate.

At the center is food rescue. From that one van, OzHarvest claims to now operate 80 yellow vans across Australia, collecting surplus food from more than 2,500 donors and delivering it to approximately 1,500 charities. It also operates two social supermarkets, giving around 500 people a day access to quality surplus food. Through a partnership with Food for Soul, its Refettorio transforms rescued ingredients into three-course meals in a welcoming restaurant setting.

OzHarvest also focuses on preventing waste before it happens. Its education programs include FEAST, which, as the initiative reports, operates in more than 1,000 schools and teaches students about food, cooking, sustainability, and waste. A sister program, NEST, builds food literacy and healthy eating skills among adults. And its Use It Up campaign, developed with Monash University’s BehaviourWorks, provides households with compostable tape as a visual reminder to use food before it spoils. OzHarvest reports that the tool can reduce household food waste by 40% and is now used in more than 285,000 households.

Since its founding, OzHarvest calculates it has diverted more than 140 million kilograms of food from landfill, helping avoid approximately 140,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas. Its programs also generate social and health benefits.

Now, OzHarvest is looking beyond Australia. Its Global Harvest program has helped organizations establish food rescue operations in the United Kingdom, South Africa, New Zealand, Japan, and Vietnam. Together, OzHarvest estimates these organizations divert more than 25 million kilograms of food from landfill each year. OzHarvest also advocates for systemic change, including clearer food date labeling. The initiative is calling for a “look, sniff, taste” approach to reduce confusion between “best before” and “use by” dates, which it estimates could prevent up to 1 million metric tons of food waste annually in Australia.

By linking food rescue with prevention, education, innovation, and advocacy, OzHarvest is seeking to do more than redistribute surplus food. Its ambition is to help build a food system where food is valued, people are supported, and less of what the planet produces ends up as waste.

Learn more about OzHarvest!