New Articles | Food waste

Reusing refuse

Startups are lining up to tackle an embarrassingly huge market

By C.S.-W.

BOMBARDED with special offers, bamboozled by choice and squeezed into narrow aisles, most people find supermarket shopping more a chore than a thrill—particularly when their shopping trolleys have a wonky wheel. It's also costly. Browbeaten shoppers often load up trolleys too high, and buy too much. In Britain alone households throw out food worth £2.4 billion ($4 billion) a year, says the Waste and Resources Action Programme, a charity promoting sustainability.

Collectively, those soggy heads of lettuce decomposing at the back of a household fridge add up to truckfuls of unwanted food traversing the roadways of the world. American consumers, manufacturers and retailers let 60m tonnes of food go to waste in 2010; in the European Union nearly 90m tonnes are spoiled annually. According to the United Nations the developed world wastes almost as much food as sub-Saharan Africa produces in a given year. Unsurprisingly, startups are lining up to tackle this “market”.

“When food companies need to get rid of food, they need to get rid of it quickly,” explains Roger Gordon, president of Food Cowboy, the maker of an app that connects American food producers and transporters with charities to minimise waste. Food producers and restaurants use the app to tell Food Cowboy what they have available. The service then parses the volume and type of waste food offered and sends notifications to nearby food banks and charities that could benefit from it (and have the ability to receive the delivery: an 18-wheel truck cannot traverse tight inner-city streets easily, notes Mr Gordon). More than 1,000 truckers have transported 500 tons of fresh food to around 60 charities on America’s East Coast, he says. The average delivery brokered by Food Cowboy is around 1,700 pounds (770kg) of fresh produce. Recipients pay Food Cowboy 10 cents per pound of food, around a third of what food banks usually pay for bought-in items. Those who supply the food benefit from a tax deduction for their charity.

Food Cowboy is not alone; similar services are popping up all over. CropMonster is a Californian effort listing excess food—a Craigslist of sorts for excess produce. And in the state of Massachusetts, an impending change in the law aimed at curtailing food waste could prove beneficial for Spoiler Alert, the brainchild of two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s business school. Emily Malina and Ricky Ashenfelter are planning to launch an app in the coming months that brokers transactions between retailers, producers and food banks.

In Germany, Christoph Müller-Dechent, the boss of FoodLoop, decided a better way to tackle the waste problem was to intervene earlier. His app connects spendthrift shoppers with retailers looking to clear their shelves of nearly expired products. In the morning supermarkets can scan in products which are near their expiry date and set a discount they are willing to offer. The FoodLoop system records these price cuts and sends notifications to users, encouraging them to visit stores to snap up the bargains.

Three stores are trialling the system; another seven will follow by the end of the year. More than 500 beta testers have bought into the discounting, increasing sales at the participating supermarkets and halving the amount the retailers throw away. FoodLoop will soon change from charging a flat fee of €400 ($534) to supermarkets for using the app to taking a percentage of each cut-price purchase. Mr Müller-Dechent has courted interest from retailers in Ireland and the Netherlands, and is in discussions with Target, one of America’s largest retailers, to test the service in its stores.

Still, it will take time for these services to take off. In the meantime, here's a simpler solution for the supermarket shopper: take a pen to your shopping list, and strike off every third item. The only difficulty may come in rustling up a meal from a box of eggs, some chives and a few chocolate biscuits.

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