We are a Rotterdam based collective of designers, currently studying and graduating at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam. Together we are multidisciplinary working on social issues.
In this project we created a solution for one of Rotterdams biggest social issues, food waste. This project is a process leading towards our individual graduation projects.
In a single day on one of the outdoor markets in and around Rotterdam, vendors daily trow away approximately 3500 kilo’s of rotten or other unsellable fruits and vegetables. They see the foods as trash and bin them.
But food isn’t trash, you just need to find a different purpose for the resisting material. We used our design background to come up with a solution. A solution that we found in gastronomie.
Chefs use different technics to create wonderful flavor experiences with fruits and vegetables using them to garnish their plates. One of those technics is to mash, cook and then dry fruits to make them into a candy like piece of fruit called fruitleather.
By producing this on large scale with the unsellable fruits from the market, a new kind of material is created. This material can be used in many different ways, creating many different products. We ourselves have created a design bag made completely out of the fruitleather material. The bag shows the quality and possibilities that fruitleather has to offer as a material.
What we want to achieve with this project is to create awareness for the problem that is food waste, and show that there is an solution. We want to work together with companies and organizations to make the material better and better, and create a wide variety of products. Increasing the quality of the technical abilities of the material as well as the wide range of product that can we created with fruit leather.
Therefore some market vendors are tendend to illigiaily dump their waste. Out of this problem our project was born. For months we weekly collected the “waste” from the market. Trough a particular process we created a new material. Original Rotterdam Fruitleather.