The Nørrebro Founder Turning Food Waste Into a Eight-Figure Business

Lukas Møller launched Restfood from a 40-square-metre kitchen on Jægersborggade in 2021 with a single contract, a second-hand refrigerated van, and a simple premise: that supermarkets and restaurants were throwing away money along with their surplus food. Three years later, the company operates out of a 2,200-square-metre logistics hub in Sydhavn, employs 67 people full-time, and cleared 112 million kroner in revenue in 2025. A Series B funding round of 38 million kroner, led by Copenhagen-based venture firm Seed Capital, closed in May.

The timing matters. Europe is lurching through a brutal summer — France recorded more than 2,000 excess deaths during last month's heatwave peak, and extreme weather is disrupting agricultural supply chains from the Iberian Peninsula to the Baltic coast. Retailers and food producers are under pressure to demonstrate sustainability credentials while simultaneously managing supply-chain volatility. Companies that can pull both levers at once are suddenly in very high demand.

Restfood's model is straightforward but operationally complex. The company collects near-expiry or cosmetically imperfect food from producers, wholesalers, and supermarket chains — Coop Danmark and Lidl Denmark are among its named partners — then redistributes it through a subscriber app at prices 40 to 70 percent below retail. The app now has 94,000 active users in greater Copenhagen. Subscribers pay 149 kroner a month and receive weekly boxes assembled from whatever inventory Restfood has recovered. There are no guarantees about what arrives, which is either a feature or a bug depending on who you ask.

From Jægersborggade to Sydhavn

The Sydhavn facility, just off Sydhavns Plads, opened in January 2026 after Møller outgrew two previous warehouses in Valby. It runs on 100 percent renewable electricity sourced through Ørsted's commercial green-power program, and the company says it diverted 3,400 tonnes of food from landfill last year — equivalent, by its own calculation, to roughly 8.5 million kilograms of CO2 emissions avoided. Those numbers have not been independently audited, a gap that critics, including food-waste researcher groups at the University of Copenhagen's Department of Food Science, have flagged publicly. Møller's team says third-party verification is scheduled for completion by Q4 2026.

The Danish government's national food-waste reduction target — a 50 percent cut from 2020 baseline levels by 2030, embedded in the 2021 Climate Agreement for Industry — gives companies like Restfood structural tailwind. Fødevareministeriet, the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, has co-funded two pilot programs this year in which Restfood acts as a logistics partner for municipal food banks in Copenhagen and Aarhus. Combined, those contracts are worth approximately 4.2 million kroner over 18 months.

What Comes Next

Møller has been open about his ambitions beyond Denmark. Restfood filed for a Swedish business registration in Malmö in March and plans to begin operations there before the end of 2026, with Hamburg identified as the next target market in early 2027. The Berlin-based food-rescue platform Too Good To Go, which operates across 19 European countries, is the obvious comparison point — and the obvious competitive threat. Restfood's subscription model and bulk-redistribution approach is meaningfully different from Too Good To Go's restaurant-surplus bags, but the two companies are already competing for the same retail partnerships in some Danish cities.

Seed Capital's investment signals confidence, but the path from 112 million to the kind of scale that justifies a Nordic-wide rollout is genuinely steep. Logistics costs in Scandinavia are among the highest in Europe, cold-chain infrastructure demands significant capital, and customer retention in subscription food services typically falls sharply after the first six months. Restfood's internal churn figure — reportedly around 14 percent annually — is better than the sector average of roughly 22 percent, but the company has yet to prove it can hold those numbers as it moves beyond the early-adopter demographic concentrated in Nørrebro, Vesterbro, and Frederiksberg.

Watch the Q3 figures. If Restfood can sustain its current growth rate through the summer while launching in Malmö on schedule, the conversation in Danish business circles will shift pretty quickly from admiration to acquisition speculation.