Our mission
Forty percent of the world’s food is never eaten.
Wady exists to cut food waste in Qatar and the Gulf, starting where food is ordered: between a kitchen and its suppliers.
The problem
Grown, shipped, cooked. Then thrown away.
40%
of all food grown is never eaten. 2.5 billion tonnes a year.
8-10%
of global greenhouse gas emissions come from lost and wasted food. About five times aviation.
~80×
Rotting food makes methane, which traps about 80 times more heat than CO₂ over twenty years.
673M
people went hungry in 2024, while homes threw away over a billion meals a day.
Every wasted meal also wastes the water, land and fuel it took to make it. Yet at COP29, 88% of countries had no food waste commitment in their climate plans.
We didn’t run out of food. We threw it out.
Asaad Al Hashmi
Why it matters here
The Gulf throws away food it does not grow.
Here, waste means food, water and money the region cannot spare.
80-90%
of the Gulf’s food is imported. Most of what we waste was shipped here first.
150 kg
wasted per person a year in the GCC, 14% above the world average.
Heat
Hotter countries waste more food. Heat shortens shelf life and strains every cold chain.
1 in 8
people in Western Asia faced hunger in 2024, and that share is rising.
The root cause
Every tomato is grown on a guess.
Nobody knows how many tomatoes Doha will eat next Tuesday. Not the farmer, not the importer, not the chef. So everyone orders a little extra, to be safe, and a little is thrown away at every step.
Nobody did anything wrong. Everyone lost a little.
Across the Gulf, hundreds of suppliers deliver to thousands of buyers, mostly ordering by hand. No one sees the whole chain.
What we do
First, make the food chain visible.
01 · TODAY
One record between kitchens and suppliers
Restaurants, cafés, hotels and caterers order from the suppliers they already use, in one free app. Every order is saved with items, quantities and prices.
02 · TODAY
Cooking from real orders
Wady Central plans production from what outlets actually ordered, minus what is already in stock.
03 · TODAY
Waste that gets counted
Kitchens record what they throw away, with a reason, and see its cost by item and by period.
Over 100 businesses in Qatar already use Wady.
Where we are going
When kitchens know what they need, suppliers can see demand coming, and farms can plant for it. That shared picture of real demand, across Qatar and then the Gulf, is what we are building toward.
Our vision
A Gulf food supply chain where every order is visible, so suppliers and kitchens see demand before it arrives, order what will be used, and throw less away.
Our mission
Cut food waste in the Gulf by digitizing the order between a kitchen and the suppliers it already buys from.
The impact we are working for
Food grown for what people will eat, not for a guess.
Qatar
Kitchens and suppliers that see what they buy, use and waste, in support of the National Food Security Strategy 2030.
The Gulf
Less food imported only to be thrown away, and the first shared picture of where the region’s food is lost.
The world
Real progress toward SDG 12.3, halving food waste by 2030, and less food grown for no one.
These are our goals. We will report results only when we can measure them.
Forty percent of the world’s food is never eaten. I’m spending my life on that number.
Asaad Al Hashmi
Founder and CEO, Wady
The tomato story
Follow one tomato.
From the farm to the plate, and why forty of every hundred are never eaten.
Read the story →
No one fixes this alone.
Less waste and stronger food security need the whole chain at one table. If you work on food security, sustainability or climate, let’s work on it together.
Sources. WWF, Driven to Waste (2021); UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2024; FAO, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2025; WRAP (2024); World Bank (2021); Oliver Wyman (2025); UN SDG 12.3; Qatar National Food Security Strategy 2030. Last updated 26 October 2026.
Photos: Unsplash and Wikimedia Commons contributors.
