Chapter 12: Robin Hood of Excess Food: An Entrepreneurial Journey of a Social Entrepreneur Padmanaban Gopalan

Social entrepreneurship is an approach by individuals, groups, start-up companies or entrepreneurs in which they develop, fund and implement solutions for social, cultural or environmental issues in an innovative way. According to the United Nations Survey, Indians waste 1.3 billion tons of food every year when 870 million people starve all over the world (UN Report 2013, https://news.un.org). One-third of the food produced in the world for human consumption every year (approximately 1.3 billion tons) gets lost or wasted. India is the second largest food producer covering 10.04% of the total world’s food production. But India ranked 97th among 118 developing countries in the Global Hunger Index (GHI) calculated in 2016. The amount of food wasted every day in India is very high, comparable to the total hungry people. So, to address this social problem, the venture was initiated to minimize food wastage and serve the hungry and needy. The data collected by interviewing the entrepreneur were interpreted and presented in the report. It was found from the study that “No Food Waste Social Project” so far served around 15 million plates of excess food till date which is worth Rs. 25 crores and weighs about 5,000 tons from surplus food recovered, and during COVID-19, 8,35,468 plates were served to the poor and needy as a part of COVID-19 relief activities.