Originally reported and written in April 2023, this story has been republished as part of our archival content.

What is the fate of daily-use essentials that don’t find buyers? How many packaged food products end up in landfills simply because they neared expiry?

These questions perplexed Milind Shah, a 29-year-old software engineer, who was no stranger to the problem of FMCG products going to waste. With his family having a distribution business in Kolkata, Milind had grown up in the city watching numerous amounts of products being discarded when rejected by their partner retailers.

Even though he had a lucrative job at Amazon’s software development department in Bengaluru for three years, Milind felt restless. He wanted to create some sort of social impact through his work. Something that would resolve the problem of wastage — an evil he knew would only increase in the coming years with consumerism.

Sharing the shocking facts he landed upon with The Better India, Milind says,“An eye-popping 69 million tonnes of food find their way to landfills every year, a problem rooted in supply chain mismanagement.”

He continued to read up about where the problem lay; why such massive amounts of food were being wasted on the one hand, while on the other hand, people slept hungrily. He says he wanted to get back into the family business to understand this situation more deeply.

So, in 2019, Milind joined his brother and father in their FMCG distribution venture.

Explaining their role in the supply chain, he says it is that of procuring products from brands and selling these to the retailers, from where they are bought by customers. While it seemed a smooth sailing concept, the techie noticed gaps, which fuelled in him a zeal to bring about some kind of a solution.

Today, his venture........

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