Food app turns bargain-hunting into a virtue

Washington — Since Susan Teaford began searching for cheap food — hunting discounts as end-dates near — the US retiree has slashed her grocery bills and made a virtue out of bargain hunting.

Now when Teaford needs groceries, she simply checks the Flashfood app, which lists all manner of goods nearing their expiry date at her local store in the Washington DC, suburb of Arlington.

Vegetables, fruit, bread, smoked fish, cuts of meat and more — all on sale at between half and two-thirds the usual price in outlets such as Giant and Meijer, as the clock ticks down on their shelf life.

The result: lower bills for Teaford even as prices spiralled higher after the pandemic — plus a deep sense of satisfaction.

"I hate food waste and love a good bargain,” Teaford, 66, told Reuters as she baked a rack of ribs bought at half-price through the Flashfood app.

Teaford said she has saved about $450 (about R7,600) on her grocery bills this year — savings that have prompted several of her neighbours to sign up, too.

"It just makes sense,” she said. "We’re just used to economising.”

Food-waste apps not only save people money — they can also play a role in reducing climate changing emissions. Farming, food processing and delivery all consume fossil fuels, while rising food production is a big driver of deforestation.

The world produces enough food for everyone but about a third of it is lost or wasted along the supply chain, according to the UNs, which says the average person wastes 74kg of food each year.

Price busters

Food-waste apps have been around for years, but close observers say the economic chaos lately — from Covid-19 to war in Ukraine — has raised their profile and boosted take-up.

Flashfood, now in almost 1,500 stores across North America, has been downloaded about 2.5-million times and says its user base has jumped more than 40% in the past year as the cost-of-living crisis has squeezed people’s budgets.

Inflation rose at its fastest rate since the 1970s in the US this year to hit 8%, while Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and supply chain problems have driven up food and energy prices.

About 10% of US households — or 13.5-million homes — are food insecure, defined as unable to consistently access or afford adequate food, according to government data.

The food bank network Feeding America says hunger has worsened with the pandemic as a result of job losses and poverty, particularly among families with children and communities of colour.

"The frequency that people are looking at the app has increased as the price of groceries has increased,” said CEO Josh Domingues, who founded Flashfood in 2016.

Since then, the company says it has diverted more than 22.7-million kg of food from landfills and saved shoppers more than $130m.

"We’re seeing incredible adoption of the Flashfood programme,” said Sepideh Burkett, a customer satisfaction worker with the Meijer grocery chain, which has 240 stores.

Meijer was able to cut in-store food waste with Flashfood by 10% in early testing, she said, as the grocery chain works towards a 50% reduction by the end of the decade.

Knock-on effect

The pandemic fuelled interest in food waste and how best to combat it, said Dana Gunders, executive director of ReFED, a non-profit organisation which advocates for systemic change and hopes to halve US food waste and loss by 2030.

"Over the past few years, we have not only seen an explosion in innovation around food-waste reduction; we’ve seen some of them succeed,” she said.

This has created a knock-on effect, with investments of $500m in 2019 blooming to $2bn last year, Gunders added.

Waste remains a challenge because it is so unpredictable and varied, ranging from unharvested fields, home leftovers, windfall fruit or soggy catered canapés, she said.

But "technology has come in with a new ability to broadcast information in real time to a whole bunch of people and make [some of] this food available”.

An app — Too Good to Go — seeks to address the sheer range of potential waste by letting users put in a $5 "order” with a restaurant, bakery or other local outlet, which buys them a surprise bag of whatever must go by closing time.

"Retailers didn’t really have a solution” to food waste, said Lucie Basch, co-founder of the Copenhagen-based app which was launched in 2016.

Big charities do a lot but cannot visit every urban bakery near closing time, meaning much goes to waste, she said.

Typically, users get food worth three times what they pay.

"As Covid came and inflation became a huge thing, to pay for just a third is great,” Gunders said. "It's a way to align your economic and ecological interests.”

The approach has proved a huge draw: Too Good to Go boasts almost 70-million users in 17 countries, saving about 300,000 meals every day.

Apps have helped the hungry, too, as the pandemic raised awareness among Americans about deprivation close to home, said Melissa Spiesman, the COO for Food Rescue US.

The non-profit organisation runs an app that connects farms, restaurants and others with thousands of volunteers in 21 states who pick up excess food and deliver it to soup kitchens, shelters and hunger-relief organisations.

"In the beginning of COVID-19, businesses began to close down or reduce their hours, and we got phone calls from everybody,” she said. "We were inundated with tonnes of food.”

Later, as supply chains became tangled, farms called too, as they ran short of workers or orders dried up.

"There was something that woke up in a lot of people,” Gunders said. "More people are aware that there are services to help them, and more communities want to do good.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation