Yume Food Australia enters liquidation with platform up for sale

Yume Food Australia has entered liquidation after a decade of building one of the country’s most prominent digital marketplaces for surplus manufactured food, setting the stage for a fast-moving sale process that could determine the future of a platform long viewed as a bridge between major producers and the secondary food market.

Liquidators Rebecca Gill, Robert Ditrich and Craig Crosbie of Teneo Financial Advisory Australia were appointed on 18 November and have commenced an immediate process to sell the business and assets of The Yume App Pty Ltd and The Yume App Holdings Pty Ltd. They are targeting strategic buyers across food, logistics, ESG, retail and technology as they look to complete a transaction in short order.

Yume launched in 2015 with a mission to cut manufactured food waste by giving national producers a digital exchange for surplus stock. Its platform has become integrated into the supply chains of several manufacturers, enabling sellers to recover value that would otherwise be lost to disposal while creating streamlined pathways for donations to food relief organisations. The company has reported $30 million returned to Australian businesses, 11.5 million kilograms of food redistributed, roughly 44 million kilograms of avoided CO₂ emissions and about 2.5 billion litres of embedded water saved.

Gill said the platform has reached a point where no near-term capital expenditure is required after substantial investment in recent upgrades. According to her, that investment created unexpected pressure on working capital which the business could not absorb. She described Yume as an acquisition opportunity for parties looking to enter or expand within the secondary food market and pointed to the company’s national buyer and seller network as a core asset.

The liquidators have begun canvassing interest while reviewing operational viability during the wind-down. They noted that the value of the platform lies not only in its underlying technology but also in the relationships and data built over ten years of trade. The team will assess both going concern offers and interest in discrete assets, although the priority remains completing a whole-of-business transaction promptly.