Turkey’s food surplus startup Fazla Gıda closes €2.5 million funding round

I don’t know about you, but as a child, if I didn’t finish my dinner plate, there was certainly no pudding on the menu for me. And while the same principle might not apply exactly here, Istanbul's Fazla Gida (or Whole Surplus) is out to accomplish the same mission: not a morsel of food should go to waste. The foodtech startup provides a platform for food companies to manage their unsold inventories with a maximum return, either monetarily, via donations to food banks, reuse in animal feed, or recycling. Including today’s €2.5 million, the firm has accumulated just over €3.4 million in funding.

Founded in 2017, Fazla Gida is already working with multi-nationals including Migros, Metro, Nestle, Pepsi, and Danone to manage their overproduction. They first analyse and classify areas of a clients surplus production utilising the Food Recovery Hierarchy stages model. The classified surplus is then cross-referenced with partners in the ecosystem, i.e. the aforementioned secondary sales, animal food, or biogas players, all with demonstrable end-to-end traceability.

If any of these zero hunger and responsible consumption and production keywords are ringing a bell, they are amongst the tenets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and Fazla Gida is one of the (only) nine global organisation to receive direct UN support via its development programme. In its infancy, Fazla Gida was recognised by Techstars and the Metro Accelerator Berlin program, followed by EGIAD and Galata Business Angels investments. Today's investment was led by 212, with MAP, 500 Istanbul and Berlin-based Atlantic Food Labs also participating.

“In the last four years, we have been able to save over 19,000 tons of food and prevented more than 62,000 tons of carbon emission with our B2B solutions”, says co-founder and CEO Olcay Silahlı. “It’s our centralized cloud platform that enables companies and individuals to figure out and manage complex surplus systems.”

CTO Arda Eren adds, “Combined with our strong operational capabilities through our service providers, we managed to complete more than 70,000 transactions on our platform so far.”