ESSENTIALS
Fight food waste
There’s a surprisingly easy way to make a positive impact on our precious planet: eat what’s in your fridge.
Producing, transporting and then letting food rot is responsible for 8 to 10 per cent of human-created greenhouse gas emissions globally, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
“Whether it’s purchasing food from restaurants or supermarkets at good rates, or making sure you’re tracking your inventory inside the household, there are lots of things that tech can do to help you on your food waste battle,” says Dr Christian Reynolds, a Reader in Food Policy at City, University of London.
Here are three ways apps can help you eat smarter and waste less:
Shop with a plan
According to the climate action NGO WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), the main reasons we throw away the food we buy are that we don’t use it in time, we don’t like it or we make too much.
Many of these issues are avoidable and apps are offering solutions that mean you can start making small, impactful changes at home.
Intelligent meal-planning apps such as Mealime combine recipes so that leftover ingredients from one meal are used up in another, and help you find recipes based on what’s left in your fridge.
And many apps let you scale down recipes – and adjust quantities accordingly in the shopping lists they create for you.
It’s important to be realistic about how much you’re going to cook or eat. As Reynolds puts it, “Sometimes we have the best intentions, we buy a load of veggies, and it stays in the fridge and gets wasted.”
He says preventing food waste begins with making a shopping list and buying what you need – nothing extra.
Know what’s in your fridge
Often find yourself doubling up on pantry items, or tossing freezer-burned food into the bin? The apps below make it easier to track what you already have so you don’t overbuy.
Adding an item to your inventory is easy: many apps let you scan a product’s barcode. Some let you add everything you purchased by scanning your grocery receipt.
They can also remind you when items are close to expiring and some apps will keep a running tally of how much food you’ve wasted.
The last feature can be a huge motivator, says Roni Neff of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “It’s kind of this unconscious thing that we do – by the time we threw it out, it wasn’t really food anymore in our minds. But when you start tracking it, you find something different.”
Seeing the monetary value of the food you’ve saved or wasted can be equally surprising (and motivating). Neff says about $1 trillion of food is wasted globally every year.
In addition to using these apps, Neff suggests having containers and labels for your leftovers ready to go, and arranging your fridge so you can see what needs to be eaten. “All those things make a big difference.”
Discover something delicious
Each day, the food service and retail industries throw out a lot of food that’s still edible, says Neff. This contributes to about 40 per cent of food waste worldwide (with the other 60 per cent coming from households).
But apps like the ones below are trying to reduce that. They help restaurants, grocers, bakeries and other shops sell discounted meals or foods nearing expiry.
Each day in Too Good To Go – our 2023 Cultural Impact App Store Award winner, which is currently available in 19 countries – businesses post “surprise bags”, along with a time window for pickup (usually towards closing).
These apps have seen great success connecting hungry customers with overstocked eateries. Since it launched in 2016, Too Good To Go has helped save more than 300 million meals, while Olio, which is available in more than 50 countries, has kept an estimated 108 million meals from going to waste since its 2015 launch.
Neff recommends letting your local restaurants and grocery stores know that reducing food waste is something you value. “If enough people tell them, it may lead to change.”