Something significant is shifting in Finland’s food redistribution landscape.
For years, the dominant donor base for redistribution hubs has been retail, supermarkets with short-dated products that did not sell. But the 2025 Hävikkiterminaalien selvitys shows that retail donations are beginning to plateau. Supermarket inventory management has improved. More products sell before they expire.
Catering and restaurant surplus, on the other hand, is growing rapidly. It increased from 1.4% to 3.8% of total hub volume in 2025 alone. That is nearly three times the share in one year.
Why the barriers are operational, not motivational
The same report is clear about why: the barriers to capturing catering surplus are operational, not motivational. Restaurants and canteens are willing to donate. But the coordination complexity of collecting prepared food in small, irregular quantities, with variable timing, is something most hubs cannot manage with their current tools and staffing levels. 43.5% of all working hours across Finnish hubs are delivered by volunteers.
Manual coordination at scale does not work. The math is simple: a hub coordinating 50 donors by WhatsApp and phone cannot realistically add another 50 catering donors without adding staff. And in an environment where most hubs operate on tight city grants or NGO budgets, adding staff is rarely an option.
What Stadin Safka did differently
Stadin Safka, Helsinki’s main redistribution hub, piloted Zipli for 21 days in June 2026. The results were concrete. Donors logged their surplus in under 30 seconds using the Zipli mobile app: 81 donations logged, 271 kg of surplus tracked. The hub saw every incoming donation in real time before it arrived. Based on the pilot, coordinators estimated saving around 34 hours a month, nearly a full working week, without adding a single new staff member. Stadin Safka became Zipli’s first paying terminal customer on 1 August 2026.
The critical insight: the bottleneck was never the willingness of donors or the capacity of the hub. It was the friction in the coordination process. Remove the friction, and the network scales naturally.
What the numbers say about the opportunity
6.6 million kg of food was redistributed by Finnish hubs in 2025. That number is growing. The total potential from catering surplus alone, if the coordination barriers were removed, is orders of magnitude larger. Finland has thousands of restaurants, canteens, and catering operations. Most of them produce daily surplus. Almost none of it currently reaches a redistribution hub.
The opportunity is there. The tools to capture it exist. The question for hub operators is whether to move now, while catering donors are actively looking for redistribution partners, or wait until the coordination problem becomes acute.
Sources: Hävikkiterminaalien vuosi 2025 -selvitys, Laura Kumpuniemi & Vesa Lampi, Luke/Ruoka-apu.fi, 29.4.2026 · Zipli/Stadin Safka pilot data, Testbed Helsinki, June 2026. Read the full 2025 Hävikkiterminaalit report.
