Discussion about surplus food from Belgrade restaurants initiated

With the Support of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Ministry of Environmental Protection of Serbia and the Mikser organization, representatives of progressive Belgrade restaurants and influential media houses gathered for the first time this Friday, November 23, at an informal work lunch. Serbian Environment Minister Goran Trivan attended the event together with his associates as a sign of support to this important topic.

The special guest of the gathering in Savamala was innovator Juliette Franquet from France, who presented her Love Your Waste startup, which has been helping restaurants and kitchens in Paris for five years now in treating surplus food and turning it into new resources. Franquet shared her experience with the leading people in the hospitality business in Belgrade, media representatives, a delegation of the ministry and representatives of the UNDP and Mikser, which was followed by a dynamic discussion about the possibilities of implementing some aspects of this practice locally.

Minister Trivan expressed great pleasure that the topic of waste food was initiated in a direct dialogue with representatives of the hospitality business, civil society organizations and media representatives as important participants in the development of a green economy based on waste as a resource and emphasized that food needed to be managed rationally and that there needed to be away to help those who don’t have enough of it. He expressed the ministry’s readiness to support such ideas and project activities which contribute to the development and the upgrade of processing, recycling and re-use of organic waste, the press release says.

This informal event coincides with the European Week for Waste Reduction and aims to popularize circular economy in Serbia and motivate the local hospitality business to contribute to the lowering of the negative environmental impact of human activity.