Love Health Hate Waste: breathing life into foods past their BBEs

Love Health Hate Waste, a business that buys and sells Best Before Date expired health foods, drinks, and supplements, has saved over £750,000 of healthy food and drink from going to landfill within its first year of trading.

The retailer buys Best Before expired stock from businesses in the health food industry and sells it directly to consumers online with up to 90% off RRP.

New Food caught up with Gavin Edley, Managing Director of Love Health Hate Waste, to find out more about the food waste challenge and this innovative business concept. As well as being MD of Love Health Hate Waste, Gavin is the entrepreneur behind Vitalife Ltd. In fact, it was his first hand experience of seeing products going to waste that was part of his inspiration for the new company. Gavin explained: “It was through seeing the stock being wasted for our other business, Vitalife Health, when things went beyond their BBD, but knowing that they were perfectly safe to consume and legal to sell – it seemed very wasteful. We then looked at our distributors and wholesalers in the industry and realised they were doing the same thing, except 100 fold in terms of volume. So we were inspired to stop this unnecessary waste through a separate brand that could specialise in this type of product – and Love Health Hate Waste was born.” 

Crowdcube

Love Health Hate Waste is currently expanding into a larger warehouse in Sheffield and is looking to raise £100,000 on the popular crowd funding platform Crowdcube.com, to help grow the business and concept further. Crowdcube allows regular individuals and professional investors alike to invest in small businesses, with anything from £10 upwards.

Gavin explained more about how he expects crowd funding will help develop the company: “We will be using the investment from Crowdcube to introduce new stock management systems in our warehouse to more efficiently manage stock and process orders. We’ll also be introducing some smart data handling techniques to more accurately market to consumers based on their particular interests, and also to expand our stock range to save even more healthy food and drink from unnecessary waste”

Growing the concept

The move to a new warehouse will allow Love Health Hate Waste to save even more products from going to a landfill site. But what happens beyond that? What does the future have in store for Love Health Hate Waste? Gavin explained more about what he wants to achieve with the company: “We’re already seeing what a great impact we’re having in both reducing waste and also making healthy food and drink more accessible to people. The ultimate goal is to grow the concept, the market, and our network of suppliers to the point where we are saving almost all BBD expired health food and drink in the UK from landfill, and in effect become the go-to place for affordable, accessible health foods, drinks and supplements for consumers.”

Love Health Hate Waste’s campaign to raise £100,000 goes live from the 18th July 2016. Visit www.lovehealthhatewaste.com or www.crowdcube.com from this date for more information.