Helpful apps to reduce food waste
- myleftoverswebsite
- Dec 9, 2024
- 2 min read
Apps that make your life easier while reducing your food waste
Reducing food waste can seem like a difficult task. Luckily there is no lack in helpful tools available.
Izi Robe from the Edinburgh Climate Change Institute and CEO of Goodies Farrah Maryam shared some of their favourite apps that has helped them in their work reducing food waste.
- I find Cherrypick very helpful in mapping out my food consumption habits and to stop myself from buying more groceries than I need, Robe says detailing how it has made hair spending habits better as well as reducing her food waste.
Cherrypick is an app that offers meal plans and recipes. Then it plans out what you need to shop and as you cook it will remember what you have used and what you need more of. The shopping list is then sorted by aisle to make shopping easier and to stop browsing where buying more than needed is easy. The app then tells you what you did not end up using to stop unnecessary repurchasing.
- In Goodies charity we use the Olio app to secure the food waste from grocery stores. Every day we get a notification when the food is available, and we then must respond that we want it within a certain time frame. If we do not it will be offered to someone else, Maryam says.
She shows us some of the days selection in the boxes where people can help themselves to what they need. Some of the food saved from being wasted are different vegetables and fruits, a variety of bread and baked goods as well as fresh pasta.
- We usually get loads of one item as the shops order too much. It makes it more difficult for us to get rid of, but we are also good at freezing meat and other items we cannot give away before it goes bad.
A third app that has become popular since its launch in 2016 is Too Good To Go. The app offers deals to buy leftover food from bakeries, restaurants, cafes and grocery stores in the users’ local area usually with an hour time frame of pickup around closing.
Usually, the price is food three times the value of what you pay, and it is a good way to save food from being wasted, getting good quality and saving money. The My Leftovers team tried the app and were very happy with the value we got for our money from two popular cafes in Edinburgh.
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