Trainconsulting has been accompanying Die Tafel Österreich for over ten years. When Alexandra Gruber took on her role as CEO, she quickly recognised that the organisation had grown beyond what purely volunteer-driven structures could sustain. First paid staff were brought on, governance and operational responsibilities needed to be separated, and the foundation had to be laid for what was to come. It is precisely organisations like this one that deserve a platform.
“We need better framework conditions – including from policymakers. But in principle, a trend reversal is possible, and we would achieve it if we approach this consistently. At the same time, we need to reverse the trend in nutritional poverty. Both are possible if we truly look at them together.”
Alexandra Gruber
About Alexandra Gruber
Alexandra Gruber has been CEO of Die Tafel Österreich since 2015. She holds a doctorate in pharmacy from the University of Vienna, an MBA from WU Executive Academy and a Master in Finance from Danube University Krems.
A new initiative – and an old conviction
The conversation begins with the initiative that brought Alexandra Gruber to the podcast: a project called “Isst das jemand?” (loosely: “Is anyone going to eat that?”), developed together with the Ökosoziales Forum Österreich und Europa. Its goal is to bring together stakeholders from across the entire food value chain – agriculture, food producers, retail, institutional catering and private households – to address food waste in a joined-up, solution-oriented way.
For Die Tafel Österreich, this is not a new concern. It has been at the heart of their work since the organisation was founded 26 years ago. What is new is the breadth of the coalition and the shared recognition that food waste is a cross-cutting issue: the more stakeholders understand the connections between their own decisions and the wider system, the more effective the collective response can be.
The numbers behind the problem
Austria is a wealthy country, and it is easy to assume that food insecurity is a marginal issue. The reality is more uncomfortable. More than one million tonnes of food are wasted annually along the supply chain from agriculture to household, with over half of that occurring in private homes. At the same time, a recent study found that 420,000 people in Austria suffer from severe nutritional poverty, with a further 1.1 million affected by mild to severe food insecurity. That is close to 13% of the population – which means, as Lothar Wenzl observes, that most people personally know someone affected, whether they are aware of it or not.
These figures underline why awareness-building is not peripheral to Die Tafel’s work. It is central to it.
Twenty-six years of change
Die Tafel Österreich began in 1999 as a purely volunteer-driven initiative, founded by a social work student and three colleagues under the name Wiener Tafel. In the early days, the idea met with genuine incomprehension from food retailers: the assumption was that what was being offered for collection was waste. The founders had to explain, repeatedly, that they were interested in food that was still good – and that there was plenty of it.
That conversation has long since been won. Awareness among retailers about reducing food waste is now well established. The organisation’s attention has shifted accordingly: further up the supply chain into agriculture and production, where food loss occurs for very different reasons – crops left in the field, unsold produce in storage, or goods that find no buyer. And further down into institutional catering, where fully prepared meals are routinely discarded in quantities that are, in Alexandra Gruber’s words, simply impossible to explain in times like these.
The connection between these supply-side efforts and the people Die Tafel serves has become clearer over time. The clients in social facilities need healthy food – fruit, vegetables, protein. The food being rescued in agriculture and production is often exactly that. The circle closes.
Why output in the non-profit sector is not money
In commercially driven organisations, success is straightforwardly legible: revenue, margin, growth. Alexandra Gruber is direct about how this logic works differently for Die Tafel.
Input is money – whether from donations or grants. But output is not money. Output is impact. The question of what that impact actually is, and how to demonstrate it, is one the organisation takes seriously.
Die Tafel conducts annual surveys with the social facilities it supplies, asking them to rate on a scale of one to ten the extent to which the food deliveries create a positive environment for counselling and support, and whether they have a health-promoting effect. With a 95% response rate and consistent scores in the seven-to-eight range – verified through independent interviews conducted by WU Wien to avoid socially desirable answers – the evidence is substantive.
The underlying logic matters. When food arrives at a social facility, more people in need come through the door. When they are no longer hungry, they are more open to engaging with the social workers and counsellors who can help them address the deeper causes of their situation – homelessness, addiction, long-term poverty. The food is not the solution. It creates the conditions in which solutions become possible. That is the social return on investment that Die Tafel is working to make visible.
Thinking big, starting small, moving fast
Lothar Wenzl draws a direct line from Die Tafel’s approach to the way he thinks about organisational change more broadly. The temptation, when faced with complex, interconnected problems, is to simplify – to address one piece of the system and declare it solved. The result is what he calls “sticking plasters”: interventions that address symptoms without touching the underlying dynamics, and that can inadvertently make the whole system harder to shift.
The alternative is to think in terms of the full ecosystem first. To try to understand, as completely as possible, what is actually connected to what. Only from that vantage point does it become clear where a small, fast, concrete action can actually make a lasting difference. The motto he borrows from the Mayo Clinic captures it well: think big, start small, move fast. The sequence matters. The big thinking is not optional – it is what makes the small steps meaningful.
For Die Tafel, this plays out in how they approach scaling. The organisation does not try to do everything itself. Instead, it positions itself as an enabler: developing guidelines, providing expertise and infrastructure, connecting social facilities with the knowledge and equipment they need to rescue food independently. The goal is not growth for its own sake but replication of what works.
Alexandra Gruber gives a concrete example: a collaboration with the bakery chain Geier, a long-standing donor partner. At the end of each day, unsold items that can no longer be donated are sold at a reduced price in-store under the “Geier-Tafelsackerl” initiative, with a portion of each sale donated to Die Tafel. The ecological impact is clear – less food in landfill. The social impact is clear – more meals made possible. And the business case turned out to be clear too: Geier subsequently ranked second in a reputation study among Austrian bakeries, with the initiative cited as a contributing factor. The double benefit – ecological and social – is also, it turns out, commercially sensible.
From volunteer association to professional organisation
The ten-year collaboration between Die Tafel Österreich and Trainconsulting began at a moment when the organisation had outgrown its original structure. It was a volunteer-run association that had accumulated momentum, a small paid team and a growing footprint – but the governance had not kept pace. The board was still heavily involved in day-to-day operations. The line between strategy and execution was blurred.
The work that followed was about creating a foundation: clarifying what the board is responsible for and what the operational team owns, separating governance from management, and building the kind of professional structure that would allow the organisation to keep growing without losing what made it effective. That foundation, Alexandra Gruber says, remains in place today.
What she observes in the organisations that succeed in the non-profit space echoes what Lothar Wenzl sees across sectors: leadership teams at the top that think entrepreneurially, that actively shape their environment rather than waiting to be shaped by it, and that resist the dependency that comes from orienting entirely around what funders happen to be willing to pay for. Mission first. Funding second – but taken seriously as an enabler of that mission, not a substitute for it.
A vision with a deadline
The conversation ends with where Die Tafel Österreich is headed. At EU level, there are now binding targets: a 30% reduction in food waste across the chain – households, retail, institutional catering – and a 10% reduction in production, to be achieved by 2030. Alexandra Gruber does not treat this as an abstract policy commitment. She treats it as an achievable goal.
The tools exist. The examples of what works are accumulating. What is still needed is scale, consistency and better policy frameworks in some areas. And a reversal of the trend in nutritional poverty alongside the trend in food waste – because, as the entire conversation has shown, the two cannot sensibly be addressed in isolation.
A value for beautiful organisations
Each episode closes with a value or principle that the guest contributes to what the hosts call the “cabinet of beautiful organisations.”
Alexandra Gruber’s contribution: appreciation – for the work, for the many partners and volunteers and staff who make it possible, and for the value of what is being done together. Appreciation, she says, is also something that multiplies when it is given away.
“Die Schöne und das Biest – Warum schöne Organisationen die Welt verändern” is a podcast by journalist Mari Lang and Trainconsulting managing partner Lothar Wenzl. Feedback is welcome at dieschoeneunddasbiest@trainconsulting.eu.
