Finland’s food aid system is under pressure from both ends.
Demand is rising. The 2025 Hävikkiterminaalien selvitys recorded over 1 million food aid visits across the five hubs that track this data. The number of people relying on food aid organisations is growing, driven by economic pressure, rising food prices, and expanding awareness of food aid services.
Supply is also growing, but unevenly. Total donated volume reached 6.6 million kg in 2025, up 845,000 kg from 2024. The growth is real, but the composition is shifting. Retail donations are beginning to plateau. Catering and restaurant surplus grew from 1.4% to 3.8% of total hub volume in 2025 alone.
Why catering surplus is hard to capture
The report is precise about the barriers. Potential catering donors often find that the donation process adds workload they cannot absorb. Hubs, running on tight budgets and significant volunteer labour (43.5% of all working hours), lack the coordination resources to manage irregular, small-quantity pickups from dozens of new donors.
The coordination math does not work at manual scale. A hub managing 40 donors by WhatsApp and spreadsheet cannot realistically absorb another 40 catering donors without a corresponding increase in coordination staff. And the economics of hub operations rarely allow for that.
The coordination trap, and how to break it
Stadin Safka was in exactly this position when it piloted Zipli for 21 days in June 2026. The decision was driven by a simple question: what if the coordination overhead did not scale with the number of donors?
The answer, from the pilot, is measurable. Donors logged their surplus in under 30 seconds: a photo, a quick quantity confirmation, and the donation was visible to the hub in real time, 81 donations and 271 kg tracked over three weeks. The hub saw what was coming before it arrived. Based on the pilot, coordinators estimated a saving of around 34 hours a month, without adding a single coordinator. Stadin Safka became Zipli’s first paying terminal customer on 1 August 2026.
What real-time visibility changes
Smarter pickup logistics
When a hub can see incoming donations before they arrive, pickup logistics can be optimised. Nearby pickups can be clustered. Routes planned efficiently. Fewer trips, less fuel, lower cost.
Easier food safety management
Prepared food has specific temperature and timing requirements. When the hub knows in advance what is coming and when, the food safety chain is easier to manage.
Faster onboarding for new donors
New donors are easier to onboard. When a new catering donor joins, they take a photo and tap confirm. The barrier to becoming a regular donor drops to nearly zero.
The data layer
Every donation logged through Zipli generates a timestamped, verified data entry. Finnish hubs increasingly operate in an environment where funders, city councils, and grant committees want verified impact numbers. The hub’s annual impact report generates automatically, updated in real time, ready to export for funders or grant applications.
The timing question
Turku’s Bloomberg Mayors Challenge win, funded specifically to develop a digital coordination system for food redistribution, is a public signal that the institutional appetite for this kind of infrastructure is real and growing. For hubs outside Helsinki and Turku, the question is not whether digital coordination tools will become standard, but when.
Early adopters will be the hubs that can demonstrate verifiable, growing impact numbers when the next funding round or city contract review comes around.
Continue reading
Why Finnish redistribution hubs are running out of coordination capacity, and what to do about it
Catering surplus is the fastest growing donation category in Finland
Sources: Hävikkiterminaalien vuosi 2025 -selvitys, Kumpuniemi & Lampi, Luke/Ruoka-apu.fi · Zipli/Stadin Safka pilot data, Testbed Helsinki, June 2026 · Turku Bloomberg Mayors Challenge. Read the full 2025 Hävikkiterminaalit report.
