The concept of food waste usually conjures images of servers removing half-eaten meals from diners’ tables and chucking the remains of the meal into the trash. There is, however, a completely separate type of restaurant food waste: the untouched edibles thrown out of the kitchen. Maybe someone ordered too many avocados, or the chef made more soup than there are diners to eat it. Whatever it may be, a lot of perfectly edible food is going to waste, and more and more see this as a big problem.
Solving that problem is the inspiration behind Too Good to Go, an app that functions a lot like Seamless, where you can buy back unused food from local restaurants at majorly discounted prices.
Through the app, a user selects the restaurant and purchases an order. From there, you just need to show up at the restaurant before closing time, where you’re given a takeaway box and can fill it with as much food as you care to. (I should clarify that restaurants sell unused food from the kitchen, not the scraps from diners’ plates.)
Prices range from £2 (roughly $2.59 USD) to £3.80 (about $4.93 USD), and you’re not just getting some third-rate takeout shack’s leftovers. Places like Yo! Sushi and Chop’d have gotten on board, as have supermarkets, buffets, bakeries, and universities.
“Food waste just seems like one of the dumbest problems we have in the world,” co-founder James Crummie recently said. The restaurant industry is wasting about 600,000 tonnes of food each year, and in the UK alone there are one million people on emergency food parcels from food banks. Why do we have these two massive social issues that are completely connected, yet there is not much going on to address them?”
That 600,000 tons of food also produces another 200 tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile, the U.S. wastes enough food annually to fill a college football stadium, and it’s estimated that worldwide, one third of food produced for humans is lost or wasted.
Read more at The Spoon: https://thespoon.tech/now-you-can-buy-insanely-cheap-restaurant-leftovers-using-an-app/
SCREENCHOW 