Danish Church Aid: WeFood and benefits of collaborating with NGO's

I'm going to give you a small presentation. I'm going to brag a bit about the WeFood brand, but I'm going to be honest too about a lot of weaknesses behind WeFood because we have weaknesses as well for sure. I am from the news media. I worked as a reporter for a lot of time. I worked with social media as well. DR is like the British BBC, not as big, but in Denmark as important. I did digital news, news on digital platforms. That was my responsibility developing those. And I was part of the group that made the branding of the DR channels. We had a lot of radio channels, TV channels, and digital services. So I took part in that branding and then came along WeFood. And a lot of WeFood, the WeFood story is partly a story of something that we wanted to do and it's also a story with a lot of coincidence, a lot of accidents maybe even. I was involved in WeFood because the woman that should have been doing it called in sick. She was away for six months and the store was going to open. We had to recruit for it. We had to do all the branding, but she was gone. So I took over. I worked for Dan Church Aid. We have a lot of employees around the world in Denmark as well, a lot of volunteers. That's the amount of money we send out to the world poorest. Those are the guys we are trying to help. We are helping around 10 million people every year. And in case you wonder about our logo, you can see it as whatever you want to, but it is a fish. It has to do with the story from the Bible about Jesus feeding people in the desert. And we are saying we are like feeding the world. That's the story of it. We are not a Christian organization in that sense that we don't go out and tell people about the Bible. We are helping everyone, Muslims, Christians, whatever. And then there's WeFood. WeFood right now is just one single store. It's on the other side of the harbor. It's opened every afternoon from three to seven o'clock. And a lot of time people are actually standing in line to get in to do shopping. And they want to buy whatever is in there. You never know what's inside because it's expired food, it's old food, so you have to go and look for yourself. What's on the shelves? You don't know. I'm going to show you a small presentation about WeFood. It's only less than two minutes. So I just go to Facebook and let them do the work. It's just things do that go out for people that are easily eaten just because the label is strongly far down. So I just put this one thing that's on the name to us. We put the name on it because it's our name. It's a story of people who really help open the discussion and get people open to the and it's always an adventure to go in here and see what we have, because it's not always the same thing. One of my favorite things I bought from here was beer that they weren't going to be in the cell. They introduced it for some of the events, and they just popped the dollar in the middle of it, and it was beer. I could have found you a better movie, actually, because we make better movies than this one, but that's on purpose, because we don't actually have to tell the stories ourselves anymore. This was from ADA+, you might know that, there's Aldous Shearer on Facebook. So a lot of media will tell this story because they want to tell it, so we don't have to do it. This one single movie came out a couple of weeks ago, and it has been watched by now by 700,000 people, so that's quite a bit, and we didn't do anything, just say, hey, you can come and make this story. Before we opened this store, we had to take care of a lot of stuff. Actually, you had to change Danish laws, because it was illegal to sell expired food, so we had to talk to the politicians, they had to change the law, and they did. We had to raise money to open this store. People donate a lot of money to us, but we can't just take that money that they gave to the world's poorest and say, hey, we want them to open a food store for it. So we had to raise money, so we did it by doing crowdfunding. You could buy a share, in Danish you call it a folkeaktie, it's a share for 100 kroner, it doesn't give you any rights at all in the company, none. You can just put it on your wall and say, I supported this good cause. And in just a few weeks, we got more than 1 million kroner from the Danish audience in crowdfunding. That's pretty good. And then we had a large donation from the Roskilde Festival, they're making a big music festival in Denmark every year, so we had 1.7 million kroner to open this store. That was nice. We had to find food, and that's probably simple, but it is not, because you had to make a lot of contracts with Danish companies, big ones, and small ones, small stores as well, the local baker. Could we get the food that they wanted to throw away? And that took a lot of work as well. And we had to find volunteers. In Denmark, people do a lot of volunteering. We have clothes sales, secondhand clothes, we have more than 100 stores with secondhand clothes. They're mostly run by old ladies. Sometimes they come to work as a volunteer, sometimes they don't. In a food store, you have to be sure that there's people there to take care of the food. You can't just say, hey, it's Tuesday, we don't have a staff, we'll just close down. So we have to educate people, we have to find them. That went well. But what we didn't know was would it catch on? And it did. The food we had was ripped down from the shelves again and again every night. The shelf was almost empty. We had to get new food, and that's kind of difficult because it has to be expired food or damaged food, so you can't just go and buy it. So we had a lot of trouble at the beginning getting enough food for this one store. Some people were actually coming, traveling from far away. They wanted to buy something, and they were kind of angry when they came in and say, hey, there's no food in the food store. What is this? So we did a lot more talking to other companies, more companies, and now we have food in this one single store every day. This story caught on internationally as well, and here's where the accident comes in because we didn't mean to at all. This was supposed to be a local brand, but BBC World told the story worldwide on all platforms. We got to all kinds of big media. Washington Post made this story the most interesting supermarket in the world. We were kind of taken by surprise. We had 200 reporters asking for interviews in just three weeks. That's a lot. Normally, I want to tell a lot about the good work we are doing around the world, and we have to go to reporters and tell them they don't come to us that often, but they came to us, and we had more than 1,000 international articles of the world. We had 1,000 international articles or things in papers, internet, and TV in just three weeks. We were mentioned that much. That is a lot, I can assure you. You have to be a very large company to get that kind of attention. And this is still just one store with almost no food on the other side of the harbor. There was a big meeting at the UN. They had to agree on the new development goals, sustainable development goals for the world. That was a big meeting. They had head of states flying in from all over the world, and the CEO from our company was invited as well because of WeFood. They wanted to see or hear about that because we actually did something for one of the sustainable goals. So she was invited. And while she was in New York, she was approached by a top guy of one of those companies, one of the five leading companies doing food worldwide. And he asked her if we wanted to do business. And that was kind of strange, and she was kind of impressed. But do business how? With one store on the other side of the harbor, and one big multinational company wanted to say, can we do business? And of course, we wondered why. I'll be back to some of the reasons, but I think one reason is that that same company is on that list as well. That's a list from another NGO called Oxfam. They do ranking of international companies every year, and they are telling, are these companies doing any good around the world? We don't want to go into it, but are they doing good compared to women's rights or whatever you want to say? And they want to be a good company. And I think the big company that made contact to us, they want to have a good place on this list. So of course, we do good. They don't necessarily anyway. So if they can match with us, they might get a better image. I think that must be it. So right now we are wondering, are we going to do that? Are we going to make partners with one of those big capitalist companies? What can we gain? What can we lose? We are thinking about it. This is a list of Danish companies on Facebook. They are all dealing with food. And this list shows how many people are following them on Facebook in Denmark. And that's a company, Jerma, on top. That's a company people like. And in just a few months, WeFood were actually pretty well presented on this list. So a lot of people came to Facebook, liked this store, and wanted to have good news about this one store. And this is still just one store on the other side of the harbor. That was pretty impressive too, because I know some of the people on this list of the companies have paid a lot of money to be popular on Facebook. We haven't. They have, that's the amount of followers we have, 40,000. That's okay. Why does this happen locally and globally? Well, this is my reasons. I think we have the right thing. The sentence you can see here, throwing away perfectly good food, that's stupid. Why do that? So we have a good story. But a lot of other people around the world have been working with this as well. In more countries. Austria, Holland, Great Britain, America. But they are not famous. So you can wonder about that. Timing is essential. And some of those NGOs, like in America, that have been working with food waste as well, well, they haven't told about it at the right time anyway. Or they perhaps haven't told about it at all. And right now, people around the world want to hear about things that are good for the world. And things they can do themselves in a simple way that helps the world get in a better place. And then we are doing a lot of storytelling. And I think that's part of the reason as well. And when I say storytelling, I mean just plain stories about what is WeFood. And I won't show you, but we have done a lot of movies. And that's where this ketchup comes in. So to be an example, this is just a posting from Facebook. It's telling about which ketchup would you rather buy, the one on the left with no scratches, or the one on the right with scratches but cheaper. And we did a lot of movies like that as well. We went to the street and say, here's two different ketchups, which ones do you want to try, or two different kind of beers. And those small stories got a lot of attention. And in Denmark, that's a lot. That's about, we reach around sometimes, well, one-fifth of the population with just one of these postings. That's pretty good. We also tried putting the WeFood sign in the hands of a lot of Danes. That's the Danish prime minister. And of course, because we are an NGO, we can do that. I don't think that if you were Coca-Cola, you could just say, hey, please hold this can of Coca-Cola. We like to advertise. But he's actually doing it. A lot of Danish people, celebrities, politicians as well, would like to promote this idea. But that's a good thing for us as well. But even the Danish prime minister being popular, he doesn't get as many shares when he posts stuff on his Facebook as we do. The movie, I checked on him this week, the most popular post he had was shared 60 times. And the posting from AD Plus with WeFood was shared more than 3,000 times. So it's living its own life out on social media. So sharing is very important for us. We are helping him. Right. We are nice. He's not helping us, so we changed it a bit around. Right. Making content, stories about WeFood that people actually want to share is very important. And if they share the story, they might buy one of our people bonds for 100 kroner and fund more stores. That's the idea. And then there's a bit of luck because I don't think we did not plan the local thing, but we did not plan the global thing. And what did we pay for all this, the campaign? This is the price we paid. It's pretty cheap, I would say. And that is covering all costs except wages. So that's for printing the shares, putting out posters in Copenhagen, whatever. That's the total amount we used last year on branding. That's not very much. The rest was people sharing. And that's important, too. We didn't use any advertising agencies, none. We just did good content. And that's the team behind. And this is where the bad stuff comes in because we have people from campaign, we have a guy from social media, we have two reporters, we have a guy very good at visual storytelling, and then we have one guy actually standing and running the store. And we have a lot of good media and a very weak store, to be honest. So that's a problem. Our campaign is better than the store itself. So we have to deal with that. So we have challenges. We were not ready for this, like not ready at all. We had companies calling from Italy wanting to go to Copenhagen with a ship full of food, a big ship. And we said, what do we do about this? Can we expand with this idea? I work in an NGO. We have stores with secondhand clothes, but we are not used to doing that kind of business. Can we hire the people we need? Can we get the money we need to expand? Do we have to find some partner? We are thinking about that. Will anyone else take this spot on the market while we are not doing it? Because everyone can see that there is a good idea here, preventing food waste. And then do we have the right partners? We have some. Are they large enough? Can they do what we want? Can they get us enough food? Can we do it in Denmark? Or should we go international? And if we are going to, how? So that's the challenges we have. We have a good brand. A lot of people like us. We have access. Every day now, still, every day still, we are turning down media because we don't have time to talk to them. Because we are saying we have to get the store running, so please. So unless it's a very big media, we say no. So 8A+, okay, that's okay. But smaller media, no. So that's what perhaps I wanted to hear you about, about some of our challenges. What do you think about this? Why are we a success? We are. And what should we do now? Fantastic. Wonderful. And we have a lot of questions. Okay, I'm so happy you would come and join us. It was really interesting. I hope you guys feel the same. So go ahead. Who was first, you? I don't think you have any questions, actually, because you don't have any choice. Someone will take your spot. And if you're not doing it, maybe a person that shouldn't have that responsibility. So I think that's a stupid question to have, because you should do it, or someone wrong would do it, or totally I will take it. So you think the Danish church, they should actually do it really fast? Is that what you're saying? Yeah. Okay. And also, like, the question about international, that's just so typical Nordic brain's work. But if you want to build a brand like Denmark, this fits pretty well in my head with the trust as a value and everything. So I don't see any questions, actually. Sorry, it's always me with an opinion. In Paris, well, in France, they've now made it illegal, as you know, to throw away the food. So that must impact on you, let's say, for penetrating the French market. Just one question if I'd like to throw in is, what have you done to overcome the fears people have of these expiry dates, and why did the governments make it illegal? What was going on with those dates? Because we're just unclear about that, I think. And I have to make something right from the AD Plus movie as well. They call us a social supermarket. We are not. In some other countries, you have to be poor to get in. You have to have a card saying, I'm poor. In Denmark, it is fancy to go in. We have poor customers coming in, but we have rich customers as well, and that's very important, and that's why the social super... You can't brand the social supermarket that well, but if the right people in Copenhagen want to go there, you can. And that's part of the answer for overcoming the fear, because we had a well-known Danish cook from TV going there and checking it out and making delicious things out of the food and say, hey, this is fine, you can eat it. So that's one way of doing it. And we have all the proper Danish authorities saying, hey, it is safe. But we still have to say, this ketchup is okay. And people trust us. So that's what I understand. It should be okay. No, you just think that because it says it's expired, but it's perfectly all right. This ketchup is more than one year expired, and I can assure you it's okay. So you just have to trust me. Some people will not trust us, and the big supermarkets don't want to sell this, because they are afraid the customers will complain when they come and say, hey, this is expired. I want to have my money back. So the supermarkets, actually the supermarkets in Denmark are trying to do this as well with luck. So you can go into a Danish supermarket, you can find an account, and you can say this one will expire tomorrow, perhaps. You can buy it cheap. So they're taking up on this as well. One quick question from myself. You were talking about changing the Danish legislation. Yeah. Was that just for you or for any supermarket? Any supermarket. Okay, so they can also sell expired food now? Yeah, not like they can't take old meat, fresh meat or anything like that. It has to be canned food or whatever. So not old milk. You can't sell old milk. But that means you don't have an advantage there. It's the same game for everyone. It's the same thing. Yeah, okay. Yeah, Henrik, you had a question or comment? I just might say, Peter, what a story. It's really amazing. I'm a little bit curious about the relationship between the master brand and the WeFood brand, because you did say something like it was supposed to be a local brand. Yeah. And right now what I see from your story is that you have such a powerful story with a lot of media coverage. And I was wondering if you regard this as a brand asset to support Folkehiggenhudhjelp, or basically a business on its own, or a brand on its own, if you know what I mean. Yeah, I do. When the idea of the store came, I thought some of you talked about that later, and good ideas come from below, not from the top. Some of you said. This came from people, from volunteers, wanting to do something. And they actually made the WeFood logo. We had one before this one that was not very good, because it was very far away from our logo. So we had to change it, although one of the volunteers did it. But this was made by a volunteer as well. And now we say it's a stock brand. And we have our brand on the WeFood brand. Yeah. But actually, a lot of people now are coming to us wanting to do volunteer work. They don't know we are Dan Churchaid. No. They know we are WeFood. And we have a lot of discussion about that. Should we be disappointed them not knowing we are Dan Churchaid, just coming to work for WeFood? And we have decided if they want to come to work for WeFood, that's okay. But in the store, we have some posters saying the profit from this store is going to Dan Churchaid, making a lot of good around the world. But they don't have to know when they come in and say, I want to buy groceries here or I want to volunteer. But when they come in, we tell them about what we are spending the money for. It's not profit. It's going to, like, Africa or the Middle East. Yes, thank you. And that was the reason, basically, that I did ask, because in your story, it's a little bit unclear how does WeFood relate to Folkeheden and how can Folkeheden's benefit from the WeFood brand. That's important. I didn't tell you. I just want to concentrate on the WeFood brand. And is it also because, Pierre, that's actually a problem that you're working on. How do we, for instance, all the followers and the sharing that's going on, how do we activate and use that in our main brand? Isn't that a challenge? That's a new challenge for us. But it's a good challenge, because, as I told you, the secondhand stores are all... Well, old ladies are very nice, and they're in the secondhand stores, but old ladies have a tendency to die. So we need younger people in our organization. And WeFood has a lot of young people. So we are very happy to see young people and young faces coming to us now. Trine has a question or comment. Thank you for your presentation. Actually, I'm following you on Facebook. And I was... WeFood or Denchurch? WeFood. And I was in for the beginning. And it's first... And my mom, she often goes to the shop, because she lives nearby. But it's the first today that I actually got to know that you're part of Folkeheden's New Help. New Help. I didn't know. So that was surprising. I want to comment on your question about should we go international and how. And from your story, I think I would recommend that you get this to work in Denmark, that you scale it to the big cities in Denmark, and then you could actually maybe think about the things that we're discussing today about circular economic, about how can you actually scale this to other trust organizations so you can actually not sell, but inspire other trust organizations to do the same. Because you're all working for the same cause, which are like making a better world in development countries. So instead of owning the idea, you should share it and you should go fast before someone more capitalistic marketers will take it over globally. So I think you should go fast about selling the idea and then about expanding to Denmark, and only do Denmark. Yeah, that's my comment. And if you could hand the microphone backwards, Peter Brown on the very back. Nope. Okay, very good. You take over. Yeah, great. I have a doubt, a question, and a proposal, so which one do you want to hear first? You decide. Well, the doubt is, I understand, Denmark is a society based on trust. And of course people trust you because you're in good faith, and they didn't encounter any harm so far by purchasing your stuff. But it only takes one single case if somebody took the wrong food and they get sick. And all these good wishes and good stories from media will be written just because of the... We have been waiting for that as well. Well, yes, just wondering if there is a more serious institution or something to review the quality. So even though somebody accidentally have some problem with the food, then you have something to refer to, which helps you a lot in this case. I must say that we have... The health authorities are coming into the shop very often. They are very well aware of this. And all our papers are okay. They're coming in for inspections all the time. And of course if we are hit by some kind of accident like that, we will of course show those papers, and we have a good story ready to tell anyone if anything happens. Yeah, sorry. I think in general in Denmark, when you see restaurants having those problems, which is much more likely because they are cooking the food, when handled right, I think they actually get by fairly easy, even though it's always a shame. As long as no one dies, yeah, but that's quite rare. Well, sorry, the question... I promise. I will say the question and propose at the same time. Don't waste time. I know there are many supermarkets that are doing very much the same thing as you do. They just have a counter to put things on sale. So in the future, do you consider incorporating with those supermarkets, or what kind of collaboration that you see in the future with these food, or you want to take them on? We already do. We have one major daily supermarket chain that we have as a partner, and we get food from them, and we want more. Because actually the food that comes from the stores, it's okay to get that, but we get that in small amounts. What would be really... The best thing for us would be to get food from the factories, because they serve a lot, even more than the stores do. So we want to go to the factories, and we get some already from manufacturers, and that's a good thing. Because then we can get food from more than one store. It's all right on the other side of the harbor to have a deal with the local bakery, but it takes a lot of work, so we would like to have a bread factory as well. Yeah, right. And the final... Sorry if I took too much of time. The proposal is things. You have such a good base on social media, on the visual part, on digital platforms. And your question is, where should we go in the future internationally or expand overseas? And the idea, or something kind of jumping to my mind, is why not grow it in a digital span, virtually? You have a virtual shop that people can actually buy your products, buy those food from those platforms. So in that way, you save your money to open different shops physically, of course. We thought about that as well. That would demand even more employees shipping it. And we have people calling, asking if they could go online and buy expired food as well. So there might be a market for that as well, but we can't comprehend right now. All right. What I just want to throw in really quick is a really similar case in Germany. They were, but a different approach. They were thinking about reducing packages or packaging in general. So they had Organale Unverpackt in Berlin, for instance, as a first store. But they used it differently. They created a really strong brand as well. They created a lot of awareness, same case, same media coverage in Germany on a national level, and then also went viral. But what they didn't do is they didn't treat the brand valuable, I think, because a lot of people also started the same movement, crowdfunding similar shops in different towns. But the whole idea, I think, could be taken even further. And that's where the similar case comes in, right? If you just use a brand in a valuable way and you maybe license it, say, okay, well, this is WeFood. That's what we stand for. Even maybe detach it from the overall organization of it. Because, like you said before, it's the overall cause. That's the good cause. And there's nothing you can deny. Even if there might be some incident coming up. I mean, people are usually aware that when they buy expired food, that it might harm themselves in some way. But that's the personal awareness of it. So I don't think any issue is going to be related there. But take the brand as a value asset and kind of try to license it or franchise it in some way. So you stick to the same message, but you share it. So it also can share similar resources on it. I mean, it starts out with labeling, doing all the marketing, doing the media coverage. And then you gain the bigger impact on the same cause, I think. All right, guys. I think a quick one from Simon Patterson. Hi. I may not have understood it well enough. But could it be as simple as simply WeFood now is a mark of quality and trust? And actually, you could give it to all the supermarket chains who have all of this food. And any product could have a stamp on it saying it's got the WeFood seal of trust and quality. Yeah, sure. So rather a standard or an idea, a business concept rather than a physical store. Yeah, you wouldn't have any resources other than sort of printing a huge number of stickers. Can I just say some personal remarks? Yeah, definitely. Of course, those questions I asked you, we are thinking a lot about those. And we are actually planning on some of it as well. We are next week announcing a new shop in a very good place in Copenhagen. So that's shop number two. There will be a shop number three in Aarhus in Denmark in just a short while. And then there will be more. So we are, of course, expanding in Denmark. And we are looking into the international part as well. And we are making different sceneries from franchise to selling to opening to give away whatever. So we are talking to a company that is very good at that sort of thing. And they are giving us some advice. And I'm pressing every day to act, of course, to do something anyway, to make some decisions. So we won't hesitate that much longer, I don't hope. All right, Pierre, thank you very much for coming.