Nominated for OUT OF THE BOX.NRW

LEROMA GmbH

Düsseldorf

Nominated by:
Christian Schachmann

Internet address:

www.leroma.de

Your business model in three sentences

LEROMA forms a digital bridge between raw material suppliers and food manufacturers. Our database and search engine for food ingredients enables a more efficient procurement process. The marketplace for surpluses aims to contribute to sustainability.

What problem do you solve?

More than 1.6 billion tons of food is wasted each year. 40% of this waste occurs at the beginning of the value chain. There are numerous reasons for this. To name a few examples: Expired shelf life, discontinuation of a product, incorrect purchased product, and many more. However, these products can still be processed into high quality products in the food industry. In case this is not possible, many food-grade products are used in other industries, such as cosmetics. The disposal of food should be the last priority. In the 10 years Marina Billinger worked as a consultant in the food industry, she recognized this problem of food waste and inefficiency. That is why she had to create LEROMA. In addition to sustainability, efficiency in companies and transparency of the market are major challenges. Food manufacturers spend months searching for raw materials and suppliers, only to discover that the raw material does not have the right technical criteria and the wrong specifications after all. And this does not include price and delivery route. Not to mention price and delivery route, which can take further weeks or months to coordinate.

What's your digital solution?

Our digital solution is divided into two business models to address both the lack of sustainability and the inefficient processes in companies. However, the foundation is a database of food ingredients that contains about 7,000 raw materials and their individual technical criteria. This is publicly available on the B2B platform. The food ingredient search engine is a tool for buyers that simplifies raw material procurement. Raw materials from 17 industry groups can be found and then filtered by technical criteria. This is supported by a crawler so that searchers can find not only listings created directly on LEROMA, but also other raw material listings from other websites. The surplus exchange promotes sustainability in the food industry. Surplus raw materials and residues are usually considered waste and disposed of. On the LEROMA marketplace, these raw materials can instead be advertised to be sold as residual materials to other food producers or companies in other industries.

Why should we award you for your digital business model?

Have you ever seen 1.6 billion tons of food in one place? LEROMA fights against this unimaginable amount every day. With 800 tons of food already saved, we have shown that our business model has a future. We want to convince even more players in the food industry to stop disposing of surpluses. The potential of LEROMA is unlimited: the digital platform can be expanded with countless functions and the creation of a database for residues from food production can support a circular economy.