Victoria’s food social enterprises are innovating to create new and sustainable edible treats

This week marks the beginning of our Open Sauce project to rescue off -cuts, excess produce and other waste items from our kitchens, farms and offices, and turn them into beautiful retail products. 

A group of not-for-profits, that are part of the wider Moving Feast collective, including STREAT, Melbourne Farmers Markets, The Corner Store Network, Cultivating Community and Make Studios, are putting their expertise and best ideas forward to reduce waste and generate profits that go back into the social enterprises them self. As well as tackling food waste, and creating circular economy products, the two-year collaborative Open Sauce project is designed to be open source in nature; it seeks to establish an open innovation process across the food social enterprises, as they share processes and best practices for developing new circular retail products.  

Fiona Meighan, chief innovation officer at STREAT in Melbourne, says: “This project will highlight the power of group thinking and innovation. We’re so excited to bring on board MAKE Studios to lead the research phase of the project, while STREAT is working on consolidating value chain mapping data and STREAT and The Corner Store Network will bring their experience creating tasty edible food products. 

“Our Moving Feast partners, Melbourne Farmers Market, have direct access to farmers' produce, and Cultivating Community are leading the way in the waste audits, which will create the data that drives what we will create as well as set up a waste audit toolkit to use across Moving Feast on an ongoing basis. We also have two masters students from Victoria University engaging across the project who amongst others will take part in a series of Open Innovation activities we will be scheduling.” 

This project is supported by the Victorian Government’s Recycling Victoria Innovation Fund as part of the Circular Economy Business Innovation Centre.