EARTH DAY, EVERY DAY
Fight Food Waste With These Great Apps
There’s a surprisingly easy way to make a positive impact on our precious planet: Eat what’s in your fridge.
Food waste is responsible for 8 to 10 percent of human-created greenhouse gas emissions globally, according to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). But small changes at home can make a meaningful difference. Here’s how apps can help you eat smarter and waste less:
Shop with a plan
There are three main reasons we throw away the food we buy, says Sam Hubble, a behavioral-change specialist at WRAP (Waste and Resources Action Programme), a climate action NGO: 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 to help you start making small, impactful changes at home.
Intelligent meal-planning apps such as Mealime combine recipes so leftover ingredients from one meal are used up in another, and they can 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.
The best way to get the most out of these apps, Hubble says, is to be realistic about how often you’ll cook.
“I keep a day free in my weekly plan to use up any of those bits and bobs that might otherwise be wasted,” Hubble adds.
Simply going into the grocery store with a list can be useful too. “Whether it’s planning meals or planning shopping, it’s just really crucial,” Hubble says. “We know a lot of people don’t check the fridge before they go off to shop.”
Know what’s in your fridge
Often find yourself doubling up on pantry items or tossing freezer-burned food into the trash? 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, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: “It’s kind of this unconscious thing we do. By the time we threw it out, it wasn’t really food anymore in our minds. But when we started tracking it, we found something different.”
Tallying the dollar value of the food you’ve wasted can be equally surprising (and motivating). Neff says American households spend about $1,800 a year on food that goes in the trash, while globally about a trillion dollars’ worth of food is wasted.
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,” Neff says.
Discover something delicious
The food service and retail industries throw out a lot of food that’s still edible every day, Neff says. This contributes to about 40 percent of food waste worldwide (with the other 60 percent 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 the App Store Award–winning app Too Good To Go, businesses post Surprise Bags with a time window for pickup, usually toward closing. (The app is currently available in 19 countries.)
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. These apps have seen great success connecting hungry customers with overstocked eateries.
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.”