Share your surplus food

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Around one-third of all food produced is never eaten.1 Some is lost in the supply chain, some is rejected because it doesn't live up to a certain standard, or consumers or retailers throw it out. In rich countries, people discard up to 35% of the food they buy.2 We need to use more of what we buy. One obvious solution is to give things away when you happen to have more of them than you can use.

Current Solutions

Some retailers offer a discount on produce when it is getting close to its expiration or best-before date. Some even give it away through charities. Apps help food service companies distribute unsold meals. This is all good.

On the consumer side, things look less promising.

I have looked at many services/apps designed to end consumer food waste by letting users share unused foodstuffs. All have one thing in common: A near-total lack of active users. One app had 1325 registered users in a 10-kilometer radius of my home. Of these 1325, not a single person was offering or wanted anything.

Maybe this is different in other parts of the world than the one I live in. But since mitigating climate change is very high on the agenda here, and people generally trust each other, I would be surprised if that were the case.

Why Current Solutions Gain Little Traction

This bugs me. We have supply (discarded food by consumers) and demand (nobody would say no to getting a needed food item for free).

So what's going on?

1. Safety

People seem to be okay with picking up, e.g., cheap meals they bought through an app. Going to a restaurant to get something feels safe.

Picking something up from a stranger might not feel safe, depending on the circumstances and your personality.

Meeting in public could help people feel safe. Even better: A dedicated place for people to drop off and get food, build a community around it.

2. Convenience

Easy:

  • open the fridge
  • notice that the carrots have gone bad
  • take them out of the fridge
  • throw them away
  • put the bag in a separate waste bin

Hard:

  • notice that you have bought way too many carrots
  • find your phone
  • locate the app
  • open the app
  • press a button to add
  • navigate to 'Carrots' (it's under 'Fresh Produce' > 'Vegetables')
  • add an approximate amount of carrots
  • add a time window where carrots can be picked up (or indicate that you prefer to meet in a public place)
  • wait for someone to express a desire to have the carrots
  • (back and forth about pick up)
  • take the carrots out of the fridge
  • wait for people to show up / go to the meeting place
  • (put the carrots back in the fridge)
  • (acknowledge that the carrots probably are going to go bad soon if nobody wants them)
  • (open fridge)
  • (take the carrots out of the fridge)
  • (throw carrots away)
  • (put the bag in a separate waste bin)

Either this has to be much easier - or it's simply the wrong solution.

Next Actions

  1. https://drawdown.org/solutions/reduced-food-waste ↩︎

  2. Paul Hawken(ed.), Drawdown, 2017, p. 43 ↩︎