New Zealand’s first ‘pay as you feel’ restaurant could be right around the corner with this clever initiative helping fight food waste and food poverty.
Everybody Eats, an awesome initiative that aims to combat food waste and food poverty in New Zealand is close to having the funds it needs to open New Zealand’s first permanent Pay As You Feel restaurant with it’s Pledge Me campaign.
Currently, Everybody Eats has a pop-up on Karangahape Road in Auckland, where each week volunteers use rescued food to cook and serve a restaurant-quality, three-course meal to guests – the majority of whom are homeless. More than 7000 meals are prepared a week here, truly feeding bellies, not bins. Customers pay whatever they like for their meals, even if it’s nothing. For every $10 raised, Everybody Eats can provide three restaurant quality, three-course meals for people in need – a service that is truly needed with a 2014 global survey finding one in six Kiwis runs out of money for food.
Everybody Eats feeds people from all walks of life, rich and poor. Guests include homeless, elderly or persons suffering mental health or substance abuse problems – and everybody is welcome.
No only is this initiative helping people who might otherwise go without a meal, but it’s also combating the thousands of tones of food waste that goes to landfills each year.
Humans spend an enormous amount of time and resources producing food, and yet around one-third of the food we produce globally does not end up in our stomachs. In New Zealand, the majority of it ends up in landfills, where it breaks down without oxygen and releases harmful greenhouse gases like methane that contribute to global warming.
In a very special adaptation of their industry changing One for One Program TOMS Shoes have also partnered with Everybody Eats to help raise money and help Kiwis in need. For every pair of TOMS Alpargatas that YOU ‘buy’, TOMS will also give a pair of sneakers to a diner at the Everybody Eats pop-up on K’Rd.
Where the pledge will go
Lease: $80,000 – so Everybody Eats can move into a own permanent home in Auckland.
Refrigerated Vehicle: $20,000 – so more food can be rescued before it’s thrown away
Fit Out: $20,000 – tailoring the new premises to best suit what Everybody Eats does.
Everybody Eats came after Loosley, who previously worked at food rescue charity Kiwi Harvest, was first exposed to the enormous amount of food we waste while undertaking research for his Master’s Degree in Green Economics. He saw prime cuts of red meat, fresh avocado, even whole wheels of cheese all just simply thrown away. After further educating himself on initiatives helping reverse food waste statistics, he returned to New Zealand to work his magic here.
Loosley and his team have a long term goal of opening these spaces in communities throughout the country. But the first of its kind still needs the public’s help to get started. So far, the Pledge Me campaign has raised $103,000 of the $120,000 it needs to open a permanent space.
For more, visit their Pledge Me campaign page here.
