We all agree: 2020 was not an easy year. It confronted us with many challenges, caused sleepless nights, forced us to make compromises, and made us climb new mountains. Even though we are happy to start the new year full of hope, we still want to reflect on what we achieved together with you in 2020.
Here we have written down for you the five things we are particularly proud of, what we would like to thank you for and what plans we would like to implement this year.
Saving lives is a collective effort. That alone is why we owe the opening of the three additional rescue markets at Berlin's Ostbahnhof, Bergmannstraße, and Wilmersdorfer Straße to you! To enable us to welcome more rescuers to our stores, Stephan Czysch helped us improve our store profiles here on sirplus.de and on Google. Many thanks for that!
Even beyond the new stores, a lot has happened: thanks to your orders in our online shop and your purchases in our rescue markets, we were able to save more in 2020 than ever before. Wow!
We have also grown internally. Our team now consists of 156 unique rescue heroes of whom we are proud: 20 nations, 75 women and 81 men, 10 trainees, two people with disabilities, seven refugees and seven formerly long-term unemployed are part of our team.
Over 750 investors believed in us this year and invested a total of €900,000. This allowed us to successfully conclude our crowdfunding campaign, which we launched at the beginning of the year, in November – despite all the obstacles that the pandemic threw our way. This gives us renewed energy to embark on ambitious plans for the future (you can find out more about these plans below).
Raising awareness about food waste and the value of food is at least as important to us as rescuing food. We pursued this goal again this year, engaging in dialogue with interested people through over 40 educational events.
We are delighted to have received two awards in 2020. For our social media engagement promoting a diverse, sustainable, and fair society, we were awarded the Smart Hero Award, which honors online commitment to a better world. The RENN network (Regional Network Offices for Sustainability Strategies) also awarded us the Sustainability Project Prize for our contribution to sustainable development.
Are you interested in learning more about the reasons behind food waste, possible solutions, and insider tips from food rescuers? You can find our courses on our education page .
Climate protection has also seen better years. The shift of almost everything to the online sphere has made it harder to see and amplify the activism. But Fridays for Future didn't let that get them down and adapted to the circumstances. We participated in the very first online climate strike in April , using homemade posters on Instagram to advocate for climate justice. In September, we took to the streets of Berlin again – albeit with a smaller climate strike task force than the year before, due to the pandemic. And our SIRPLUS “Good Climate News”: Incidentally, together with you, we also saved over 4 million kg of CO2e *.
*These CO2e emissions were used for the production, transport, and distribution of the food and were not emitted in vain thanks to your rescue. The calculation is based on values from the Thünen Institute.
With the VAT reduction, we decided to triple our donation for schoolchildren in Burundi. Our partnership with Welthungerhilfe (World Hunger Aid) has been running since May 2019: For every order you place*, we donate a school meal to Welthungerhilfe's "Learning Better Without Hunger" project. From July to December 2020, we channeled the VAT reduction into the project and, together with you, donated three meals per order. In total, this resulted in over 130,000 school meals in just one year!
You can read on our project page why we chose this project and how many school meals we have currently donated with your help .
*per order of €10 or more in our online shop
We have big plans for this year too:
- We want to break our 2020 food rescue record and save a whopping four million kilograms of food next year. Will you join us?
- We also plan to launch new SIRPLUS products to help us rescue more surplus raw materials and return them to the cycle. Stay tuned!
- We're also planning to launch a fruit and vegetable delivery service in Berlin. Stay up to date by following us on social media ( @sirplus.de )!
- Our main goal is to raise awareness among millions of people next year about our core issues of food waste and appreciation.
We look forward to another year of food rescue with you!
