One million saved meals

Three years ago, we started a collaboration with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI), a foundation led by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and ruler of Dubai, to do just that.

McKinsey is collaborating with MBRGI and the UAE Food Bank to deliver one million meals from repurposed food that would have otherwise gone to waste in the UAE. This one-million meal humanitarian initiative will help combat hunger and contribute to a larger one-billion meal campaign, fulfilling the foundation’s main goal of reducing food waste, especially during Ramadan. In fact, more than two million saved meals were delivered during this collaboration.

To reduce food waste, we partnered with supermarkets, retail chains, hotels, and restaurants to repurpose food items that were near expiration and would otherwise be thrown out. We also worked with hotels and restaurants with excess food left over from buffets, especially during Ramadan. Finally, hotel and restaurant kitchen leftovers were recycled into compost that was then donated to farms across the UAE. To make this system work efficiently, we developed a digital tool that manages the ecosystem of donors and partners, designed a dashboard for tracking meals to create transparency on the number of meals packaged and delivered, and tally the number of vulnerable individuals and families who received the meals.