Check Out Food-Upcycling Apps

About 40% of America’s food supply is not sold and uneaten each year. So much food is rotting in fields, put down the drain, or being shunted to incinerators and landfills which causes climate change. All the resources, water, energy, fertilizers, pesticides, land, labor, and transport are wasted as well. But new food-upcycling apps are changing all that.

Hungry Harvest, Imperfect Foods, and Misfits Market sell discounted wonky produce. Olio, encourage shaving between neighbors, FlashFood, Till, and Too Good to Go focus on food recovery by salvaging the foods headed for dumpsters at restaurants and retailers.

Too good to Go has roots in the European activist community and was launched in Copenhagen in 2016. The company hit the U.S in 2019 and has over 2 million users across a dozen cities who have resulted in 1.6 million meals here. Users can purchase deals on surprise bags from local businesses: they range from coffee to barbecue, desserts, pizza, sandwiches, and even canned goods near their best-by dates.

The FlashFood app allows shoppers to select discounted groceries, which saves them $340 per year on average. “Food waste is a very time-sensitive issue. You’ve got a very small window to redistribute that food so nothing good goes to waste – digital solutions are the way to do it.” according to Leadbeater, Fresh Food’s VP of marketing.

These apps can solve hunger and environmental and food waste issues simultaneously. However, some say food waste could be solved more fully and equitably if it were tackled at the community level, with neighborhood farms, local and regional food cooperatives, regenerative agriculture networks, and community-supported agriculture models.