Measuring the impact of food rescue: A social return on investment analysis

Food rescue organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand help to reduce food waste and provide temporary relief to food insecurity. However, many of these organisations depend on donations and short-term philanthropic or government funding, which creates financial uncertainty and often requires them to demonstrate the impacts of their work with limited resourcing. While frameworks exist to demonstrate social value and associated monetary proxies like social return on investment (SROI), they are often resource-intensive and challenging to apply to multiple actors with different operating models like food rescue groups. This paper presents a SROI approach to measure the social value of three different food rescue models (Community Hub, Free Store, and Mixed model) in Aotearoa New Zealand. We describe how we adapted the seven guiding principles of SROI to explore how food rescue creates value for different actors in the food rescue process, including food donors, food recipient organisations, food rescue volunteers, and food rescue recipients. We used stakeholder interviews and quantitative data to develop nine primary outcomes. Financial proxy values were assigned to these outcomes, calculating an SROI ratio of NZD 4.5:1, indicating that an investment of $1 in food rescue delivers $4.5 of social value. This study adds to the growing literature on the impact of food rescue organisations and highlights the importance of taking a multi-case study approach to capture the true value created by this sector. Additionally, it emphasises the crucial role of food rescue organisations as ‘community connectors’ and their transformative potential in addressing food security issues.