Woolworths Group is a food and
everyday needs business, retail business.
Predominantly though,
food is at the heart of what we do
and so, we have the largest
supermarket business across Australia and New Zealand.
Food waste is incredibly important to Woolworths Group.
Food waste globally, almost a third gets wasted and
we've equally got people that are going hungry.
The whole food system itself is going to have to shift
and is going to have to do things completely differently.
And so, there's this real opportunity to digitalize that,
make it more efficient,
get more of the produce to market, quicker.
Refresh Food is a marketplace, a digital platform,
which enables farmers to upload produce really,
really quickly on the go and helps those farmers
match that product with buyers out in the market.
The vision for Refresh Food is to
eliminate upstream food waste
and give farmers an opportunity to sell
and ultimately get a return for more
of their produce that they grow.
By digitizing the way people transact and
creating new connections across the ecosystem,
Refresh creates a more efficient marketplace,
creating more matches between buyers and sellers,
reducing the produce that
doesn't find a home and goes to waste.
Our Scope 3 is 93% of our total emissions.
None of that is within our control,
that sits within our supply base.
Partnering with BCG and BCG X was just seamless.
What I loved about the whole process
and the whole approach was that the two teams were
just working so incredibly well together as one.
BCG partnered with Woolworths on the
end-to-end journey, everything from identifying
and validating the initial idea, all the way through to
building the first version of solution,
getting first customers, hiring the team that would take it
forward and launching it into market.
BCG have a tried and tested methodology when bringing
start-ups and new ventures and
how we married that with a big corporate.
the BCG team sort of led us on that journey.
At BCG X, we are big believers in the
power of getting out of the boardroom and into the market.
Our strategic designers were able to work with farmers to
co-design solutions that would be
adopted in their context.
What I loved about the process with BCG
was the discovery process
that we went through to find out
what the exact customer need was.
So, I think it was a great cohesive team
that BCG put together
with product developers, designers, engineers
who all worked seamlessly together
to resolve the customer problems.
We ended up being able to launch Refresh Food
much, much quicker than I ever thought
was going to be possible,
and we've got something that's out there in market
that is for the greater good and is actually
making a difference which I think is super cool.
It's allowing farmers to move and sell their excess produce
and the likes of Foodbank, Ozharvest, Fairshare,
and able to get the produce and
get it into the stomachs of people that need it.
We've done 600,000 meals in the last four months and
we're well on the way to exceeding
a million in the next three or four months.
We see this as an industry solution and
we've set it up as a profit-for-purpose business and
one in which we're looking to partner,
actually, with our competitors out in the marketplace
because we all need to lean in
and solve the food waste issue
in Australia, together.
We can't do it on our own.
Better together for a better tomorrow.