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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how digitalisation reconfigures the infrastructure of food surplus redistribution. It highlights tensions between waste prevention, redistribution and food security, showing how digitalisation facilitates coordination while reshaping the conditions for redistribution.

Paper long abstract

A key element of imagined food futures is the efficient management of flows to reduce food waste.

Drawing on research on food system sustainability conducted within the European project ToNoWaste, this paper explores the link between digital solutions for food waste and food charities. Exploratory interviews conducted in 2025 within the food redistribution infrastructure in Vienna, Austria, reveal tensions resulting from the deployment of efficiency-driven digital applications. Predictive software in retail or gastronomy or digital surplus-selling applications may contribute to reducing the availability of food surplus. While positive for resource efficiency, this also seemingly affects food charities, which currently rely on surplus generated by the food system. These overflows therefore have, at least in part, a social function (Lambie-Mumford & Silvasti, 2020; Poppendieck, 2014; Riches, 2018).

Building on these interviews with stakeholders from redistribution networks and social organisations, I examine how digitalisation reconfigures the infrastructure and conditions of food surplus redistribution, including the effects of improved coordination and visibility of surplus, the monetisation of surplus, and the need for charities to reorganise in response.

Examining reorderings in the social and infrastructural realm, this paper highlights tensions between waste prevention, overproduction, redistribution, and food security. It shows that while digitalisation facilitates coordination and makes information about surplus part of the infrastructure of redistribution, it does not replace the material, organisational, and social infrastructures required for redistribution. The paper therefore argues for taking the infrastructural conditions of digital food-waste applications seriously when considering pathways to reduce food waste and support food security.