Food redistribution platform Yume Food has been placed in liquidation, with the 10-year-old social impact startup and its assets being put on the market.
Founder Katy Barfield and the Yume board handed the keys to Teneo Financial Advisory Australia as liquidators on November 18.
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Yume’s digital trading platform generates additional revenue for food manufacturers by selling surplus products, and also streamlines donating unsold food to relief organisations. Its corporate clients include FMCG giants Mars, Unilever, Kellanova and General Mills.
Barfield founded her social enterprise in 2015 to reduce manufactured food waste. Over the past decade, it generated $30 million in additional sales for local food manufacturers and redistributed 11.5 million kilograms of quality food. Those efforts also helped prevent 44 million kilograms of CO₂ emissions and saved 2.5 billion litres of embedded water by reducing food waste.
Strain on operating capital
Teneo liquidator Rebecca Gill said they’re undertaking an immediate sale process and believe there’s potential for Yume to continue as a going concern.
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“Having successfully completed significant platform investments, there would be no near-term capital expenditure needed, but unfortunately this investment in the platform has put unexpected strain on Yume’s operating capital,” she said.
“This is an attractive opportunity for a prospective buyer to leverage the 10 years of investment into this platform, as well as the relationships and network Yume has built.
“Yume has developed an impressive technology platform which provides a national market for food manufacturers to sell product that otherwise may have been disposed. Over the past decade, Yume has established a national network of buyers and sellers, creating a secondary food market that’s become an established and valuable part of many manufacturers’ supply chains.”
A broken-hearted Barfield said, “there are moments in leadership that truly test your heart, your conviction and your resilience”, revealing on LinkedIn today that they’d made the difficult decision to wind up operations.
“Whilst there’s sadness in that sentence, there is also a deep, unshakable pride,” she wrote.
“When we began, surplus food was treated as an operational problem to be quietly hidden away. We understood it could be reimagined as a climate solution, a commercial opportunity and a new standard for how business could and indeed should, operate as a social enterprise. Proving that environmental, social and economic value can scale together
“We proved that understanding to be correct.”
More than metrics
The Yume founder said what they achieved was more than metrics: “They are people fed, emissions avoided, industries supported, a system challenged and ultimately changed”.
Barfield, who previously developed food rescue charity SecondBite, raised $7 million for Yume.
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In January 2024, she banked a $2 million seed round led by Investible’s Climate Tech Fund, Investible’s Early Stage Fund 2 and Club Investible syndicate, with support from LaunchVic, Goodrich Group, and Veolia, as well as angel investor Pitzy Folk, who Barfield praised as a “legend” in thanking her investors for their support.
“Startups are hard. Mission-driven ones even harder. They demand that you build the solution, the market, the belief and the behavioural shift all at the same time,” she said.
“This against a backdrop of the toughest capital raising market in recent memory. We never lost belief, nor drive. We did not stop building. We simply ran out of runway.”
Barfield said in the short term she’ll give herself “space to rest, reflect and reset,” but she remains undaunted about the mission behind Yume.
“The fire burns brightly. And when the path forward becomes clear, it will be met with the same conviction and imagination that fuelled this one,” she said.
“For every founder walking the hard road because it is the right one, keep going. Courage and clarity change systems long before the system rewards you for it.”
The liquidators are inviting expressions of interest from potential buyers in food, logistics, ESG, retail, and technology.
This article was first published by Startup Daily.
