Preventing Good Food From Going to Waste

The volunteer initiative Foodsharing is helping reduce food waste in Germany by collecting donated goods from restaurants, grocery stores, and other food businesses and distributing them to anyone interested. The food is given away through communication channels like WhatsApp groups or publicly accessible places like community fridges, and you do not need to meet any qualifications to get it.

Finding alternatives for uneaten or imperfect food reduces waste. In Denver, multiple initiatives, ranging from the city’s Certifiably Green Denver program to tech startups and nonprofits, are working to tackle the problem of excess and wasted food. The nonprofit organization, We Don’t Waste, redistributes unused food from large venues at food banks and farmers markets. The tech startup, FoodMaven, similarly aims to reroute food from the landfill to consumers.

Technology can help reduce food waste. Olio and Winnow are two examples. Olio is an app that allows people to easily exchange extra or unwanted food for free. Winnow is a smart trash can that calculates the cost of waste in commercial kitchens, inspiring chefs to be more creative to save both food and money.

While the USPS has seen a drastic decline in revenues and capacity in recent years due to growing competition from the private sector and social changes, First Class Meal is reimagining the role that this institution has to play: improving national access to healthy food. Using the existing USPS app to connect organizations and food banks that struggle to distribute donations, postal drivers out on their normal routes would pick up donations, deliver to food banks or pantries, and store food in post offices with excess capacity.

A group of volunteers in Luxembourg City collects edible food that shops and restaurants would dispose of at the end of the day to keep it from ending up in the garbage. Members of the organization, called Foodsharing Luxembourg, are informed through an app when food is available for pickup. Once they claim an order, they pick up everything the store offers and decide how it gets redistributed.

Restaurants, grocers, and cafes can put together surprise bags of surplus food that would have otherwise been thrown out and sell it for a third of the original cost to users on the Too Good to Go app. The app was designed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that accompany food waste while giving businesses a way to recoup losses and consumers a less expensive way to access good food.

As inflation rates skyrocket, apps like Canada-based FlashFood are proving users the option of purchasing surplus food at discounted rates from nearby grocery stores and restaurants. It has helped consumers reduce their grocery bills, sometimes by half, while keeping almost 45 million pounds of food waste away from landfills since 2016.

The RVA Community Fridges addresses the issue of food insecurity by setting up household or industrial refrigerators outside of a host business, like a restaurant, non-profit or church. Anyone can swing by a fridge and take whatever they need or leave whatever they can. To fill the fridges, community members, local businesses, and other organizations donate purchased or cooked food.

Kitovu Technology is a social enterprise that aims to use data and technology to help farmers in Nigeria increase their crop yields and access new markets. Since 2017, the company has trained over 300 agents to work with about 12,000 farmers on using the mobile app to track their progress. The company also partnered with the government on a pilot program to introduce an electronic warehouse system to allow farmers to store their grains.

A third of surveyed college students experience food insecurity, the rate is even higher at Western Washington University. To address the issue that university has unfolded a number of responses; food pantries, meal donations, community gardens, and state assitance, among others.