“This is happening a lot more than we realise – it is just not really spoken about,” Ms Barfield says. Rescuing edible food is the raison d’etre of Ms Barfield, who in 2014 founded Yume Food, an online marketplace that connects food suppliers to buyers. The Melbourne start-up recently took out three awards – including the Premier’s Recognition Award – at the 2018 Premier’s Sustainability Awards. Ms Barfield won’t tell us the brand of the yellowfin tuna, but let’s just say it was premium. It was intended to be sold in 50-gram sachets as part of a salad pack. But when the product got pulled from supermarket shelves because it wasn’t selling the supplier was left with 550,000 sachets of tuna.

“That was really hard to place – a lot of buyer groups came to the rescue,” says Ms Barfield, laughing. “People are very creative once they know a problem exists in the first place. “(Australian grocery chain) Harris Farm (Markets) put it in their shops. It was going out at 15 cents a sachet and this was a top brand.” Yume Food posts heavily discounted food on its website. The state, minimum order and available quantity is all listed. (Tassie salmon, coconut water concentrate, peach paste, blackcurrants and chicken breasts are among the items currently up for grabs.) “The suppliers win because they don’t have to pay to get rid of the food, the buyers win because they get a discounted price and the environment wins massively.” Ms Barfield says a boutique hotel in regional Victoria was once astonished to find Tequesta Bay lobster tails on the site (the supplier ran out of room in their warehouse). The hotel was able to serve lobster tail sliders at a function – a canape normally well out of its price range.

Nestle was once stuck with 14 tonnes of Maltitol, often used as a sweetener in diabetic food, for a product that never went ahead. Yume Food was able to connect it to a pharmaceutical company, which used it as a coating for pills. “That’s what I mean about how creative people are,” Ms Barfield says. Ms Barfield says her lifelong passion for reducing food waste was kick-started at her time as the founding CEO of SecondBite, a charity which redistributes food to the needy. (Its founders Ian and Simone Carson have just been named joint Melburnians of the year.) However, Ms Barfield says food charities are only able to save about 2 per cent of food waste and she wanted to find a way of redirecting more from landfill or deep burial. More than 250 suppliers and 1500 buyers have signed up to Yume Food: Ms Barfield is especially proud to be able to assist farmers, whose livelihoods could be jeopardised on the back of a cancelled order. Ms Barfield is hopeful the social enterprise start-up, which takes 10 per cent of each transaction, will finally be financially sustainable next year. “It’s been the hardest thing I have ever done.”

She says she would love the government to use Yume Food to source food for its prisons and aged care facilities. “As soon as we know who wins the election I will be first cab off the rank with a proposal – they might regret giving me that award.”