When Mr Lau Jiacai was an exchange student in Germany in his final year of university in 2015, he survived on produce that were close to their expiration dates. “I was trying to save money, and the supermarkets had a section where they sold such produce at a fraction of the price, to prevent waste,” says the 30-year-old.

Although he graduated with an accountancy degree and became a financial services auditor, the memory stayed with him.

At the same time, his long-time friends, Messrs Nicholas Lim and Tyler Jong, were confronting food waste.

Mr Lim was interning at a shipping and commodities firm when he encountered an episode where 25 tonnes of avocados shipped from Mexico to China were rejected because of a single dead insect in one of the crates. He renegotiated with the supplier in Mexico for a discount and managed to prevent the avocados from being binned by selling them to a partner in the Philippines.

Mr Jong, on the other hand, volunteered at food distribution programmes and noticed the glut of donated food items that were close to expiring. After sharing such experiences with one another and conducting research on local food waste, including speaking to food suppliers, the trio decided to quit their jobs in the finance and banking industries in 2017.

That same year, they formed TreeDots, a social enterprise dedicated to tackling such waste at the business-to-business level. It buys suppliers’ unsold food to sell to the likes of hawkers, eateries and even consumers at a discount.

The company’s name represents their vision of connecting the different dots on the food supply chain, like how a tree is linked to its branches and leaves.

Mr Lau explains: “A grocery chain might reject a chicken that is too big or has a broken bone. But eateries won’t care because they can cut it up and cook it, and make it look nice for their customers. If they can get the chicken at a discount, even better. This way, with TreeDots, everyone wins.”

He adds that certain food items such as fish heads, tiny chicken wings and even expiring canned goods are not popular with some eateries and restaurants, so TreeDots helps minimise wastage by selling them to hawkers or consumers at a fraction of the original prices.

The firm has redistributed 10,790 tonnes of food so far, equivalent to 30 million meals. It has attracted more than US$10 (S$13.4) million in funding from investors, enabling it to expand to Malaysia and Indonesia in 2021.

Although TreeDots has found buyers for mislabelled drinks and canned food, bruised chicken parts, novelty food items that failed to sell and a wide variety of other products, it is still scratching the surface of the food waste problem, Mr Lau shares.

In 2021, Singapore generated 817,000 tonnes of food waste, including perfectly edible food, and recycled only 19 per cent of it. Globally, the United Nations estimates that 14 per cent of food produced is thrown out or lost before it reaches shops. Another 17 per cent is wasted by retailers and people who buy the food.

He says: “Our goal is to have such a large base of buyers that we can receive and sell any kind of product. We want to build an ecosystem where food can go where it’s needed and wanted, so that we waste much less of it.”

Making the most of food

Although the three co-founders were convinced of their mission and method to curb food waste, the early going was a struggle. “Suppliers didn’t want to admit that they were wasting food. It took a long time of walking the ground and talking to them before we got our first job: selling 40 boxes of margarine,” Mr Lau recalls.

They visited hawker centres and other eateries to find buyers for their products. To save money, they bought a truck and managed all of the food pick-ups and deliveries themselves. “Between trying to get new suppliers and buyers, transporting the food, doing our accounts and working on securing financing, we were each sleeping about two to three hours a day.”

They also had to absorb mountains of new information. “Take chickens. To work with buyers and suppliers more effectively, we had to know the different types and brands of chickens, and the products they came in, such as skinned, skinless, wing, thigh, boned and so on. Then you get to prawns and it’s a different set of terms, such as HOSO, which means ‘head on, shell on’. Every product had a learning curve.”

Still, they persevered. As business grew, they assembled an experienced operations team to refine how the company stores and transports different kinds of food. They bought more trucks and hired drivers. Today, TreeDots has 99 employees and delivers about 13 tonnes of food per day to a pool of about 4,000 buyers.

As TreeDots expands its services, it has the opportunity to work with even more suppliers. Mr Lau explains: “As we work with more companies, they also come to us when they need to offload their unsold food. We can open more doors and build better relationships with suppliers.”

In 2018, the company launched an app for customers to browse its products and place orders. Usage was low at first, hampered by many food establishment owners’ lack of tech-savviness, especially among hawkers, but increased during the Covid-19 pandemic, as more people became familiar with apps.

From landfill to lifelines

As Mr Lau and his partners focus on scaling up their business in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and beyond, they envision a future where TreeDots can redistribute unsold food even across borders. “The larger we grow our footprint, the more exposure we’ll have, and the better we can clear inventory,” he says.

The firm has forged more partnerships to advance its cause. Since August 2022, restaurants listed on food delivery platform Deliveroo can cut their ingredients’ cost by up to 90 per cent by buying them from TreeDots. With this initiative, TreeDots has brought more eateries on board.

Mr Lau believes that most people want to help reduce food waste. He says: “Many of us grew up with our mothers telling us not to waste food. The problem is that, besides using up all of their food and not buying too much of it, most people don’t know what else they can do.”

“We see it as our role to provide businesses and people with another avenue to make a difference. The food waste that happens at the business-to-business level is appalling. Why are we producing so much and then just throwing such a big portion of it away, when you have people dying of hunger? We can do better, and we have to do better.”

We The Earth is a partnership between The Straits Times and Rolex and its Perpetual Planet Initiative. Surplus food marketplace co-founder Lau Jiacai is a stellar example of the many individuals who are doing their part to solve the issues earth faces.