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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Ends & Stems

Spoon Plus: The Consumer Food Waste Innovation Report

Nowadays, governments, grocery retailers, industries like agriculture and grocery, tech companies, and many others are working to fight food waste at both the local and international level. In the developed world, at least, much of that focus over the last 12 months has been on the consumer kitchen, which is responsible for by far the most food waste in those regions.

This report will examine why so much food is wasted in the consumer kitchen, what new technologies and processes can be leveraged to fight that waste, and the companies working to change consumers’ relationship to both food and waste.

Report highlights include:

  • One-third of the world’s food goes to waste annually. In the U.S. and Europe, the majority of that waste happens downstream, at consumer-facing businesses and in the home.

  • Food waste at home is a three-part problem that stems from a lack of awareness about waste, inadequate information and skill sets around home cooking, and the convenience economy driving consumer behavior.

  • Grocery store shopping, current recipe formats, inconsistent date labels, and a lack of smart storage solutions for grocery purchases and restaurant leftovers are the main drivers of at-home food waste.

  • The refrigerator itself may be one of the single biggest contributors to food waste. Moving forward, appliance-makers will need to consider overhauling the appliance’s entire design to help consumers fight food waste.

  • Solutions for fighting food waste will come from a range of different players. For tech companies, areas of focus will include more smart appliances and more tech-enabled storage systems as well as meal-planning and meal-sharing apps.

Companies profiled in this report include LG, Samsung, Vitamix, Smarter, Ovie, Bluapple, Mimica, Blakbear, Silo, Mealhero, MealBoard, Kitche, No Waste, Ends & Stems, and Olio.

Introduction: The Size of the World’s Food Waste Problem

In 2012, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released the first edition of its now-famous report, “Wasted, How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food From Farm to Fork to Landfill.” That report proved to be a groundbreaking look at the inefficiencies in the U.S. food system that lead to massive amounts of food waste from the farm all the way into the average person’s kitchen. 

The report also proved to one of the biggest catalysts for change in recent years. Since its publication, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced federal targets to cut food waste by 50 percent by 2030 — the first goal of its kind in the U.S. Similarly, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 12.3 seeks to “halve global food waste at retail and consumer levels, as well as to reduce food loss during production and supply.” As NRDC noted in the second edition of “Wasted,” published in 2017, food businesses have made commitments to reduce waste, and 74 percent of consumers polled say fighting food waste is important to them. Most recently, the Consumer Goods Forum launched its Food Waste Coalition that aims, in part, to support SDG 12.3 by focusing on consumer-facing areas of food waste like home and retail. And these are just as sampling of the countless efforts happening on both international and local levels in the war on food waste.

Even so, the oft-cited figure, that one-third of the world’s food supply goes to waste, is as relevant now as it was nearly a decade ago when NRDC first published its report.

In 2020, food waste is a multibillion-dollar problem with environmental, economic, and human costs that grow more urgent as the world advances towards a 10-billion-person population. The United Nations’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) estimates food waste’s global carbon footprint to be 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases, and that economic losses of this food waste total $750 billion annually. The United Kingdom’s Food Waste Recycling Action Plan (WRAP) notes that keeping food scraps out of landfills would be the equivalent of removing 20 percent of cars in Britain from the roads. Meanwhile, over in the U.S., rescuing just 15 percent of the food we waste could feed 25 million Americans each year, or well over half of the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity.  

Worldwide, different regions waste food in different ways. UN estimates show that per capita waste by consumers in Europe and North America totals to 95-115 kg/year. That number drops significantly, to 6-11 kg/year, in sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeastern Asia. Overall, 40 percent of losses occur at post-harvest and processing levels in developing countries. Not so in developed nations, where over 40 percent of food waste occurs at retail and consumer levels.

Given the enormous amounts of waste occurring at the consumer level in Europe and North America, it makes sense that recent efforts towards fighting food waste now go towards understanding how and why food gets wasted downstream, at grocery stores, restaurants, and, most importantly, within consumers’ own homes.

The full report is available to subscribers of Spoon Plus. To find out more about Spoon Plus, click here. Use discount code NEWMEMBER to get 15% off an annual or monthly subscription. 

With Ends & Stems, One Founder Takes on Home Food Waste

Unless you’re very, very organized, chances are you often are left with odds and ends in the fridge after cooking a week’s worth of meals. More often than not, those odds and ends end up in the trash or compost bin. A new meal-planning service Ends & Stems wants to prevent those leftovers in the first place by providing curated recipes to help optimize perishable ingredients. The startup launched its web app today. For $12.50 per month ($9.50 if you pay for the whole year at once), users will get an email every Friday morning with three recipes to cook the following week. They then select the number of servings (up to 6) and the app will generate a grocery list which can be printed or saved as well as a “prep ahead” list. The recipes reduce waste by helping users get the most out of their ingredients so that there are no awkward bits leftover at the end of the week. So, for example, two recipes will each make use of half of a cucumber, or all three recipes will use some green onions. The recipes also make use of oft-discarded parts of ingredients, like carrot tops. There’s also a free part of the site where users can recipe search based on any two ingredients they have in their fridge. The app itself combines two trends we’re seeing a lot of lately: food waste and curated meal experiences. But perhaps the most interesting part of Ends & Stems is that, unlike many startups who claim to be reinventing cooking through apps and other tech, the company’s founder, Alison Mountford, doesn’t have a tech background. She’s also a solo founder, and has self-funded her company. “It’s a big challenge,” she told me over the phone recently. However, Mountford knows what it takes to make it as an entrepreneur in the competitive food tech world. After completing culinary school she started a meal delivery business in 2005, back when the entire concept of meal delivery was pretty new. Mountford sold it 10 years later and began working at the much larger (now defunct) meal delivery service Munchery. It was there that she saw the massive amount of waste created by inaccurate produce ordering and wasteful food prep. She launched an Instagram featuring tips on how to cut down on food waste, which was the seed that eventually became Ends & Stems. To make what’s essentially a one-woman company work, Mountford has to be very strategic about how she invests her resources. For instance, she told me she’s not planning to make a mobile version of the Ends & Stems app because it’s a) expensive, and b) she thinks a responsive website is all she needs. Mountford’s theory is that people typically meal plan from a static place, so there’s not really a need to have it available on-the-go. She also has to prioritize just how granular Ends & Stems can be in terms of functionality. Users can customize certain aspects of Ends & Stems — like choosing a vegetarian track or opting out of seafood — but Mountford doesn’t offer high levels of personalization à la Innit. This is in part because she doesn’t have the tech abilities to do so, but it’s also intentional. “People don’t want too many choices,” she explained to me. Ends & Stems isn’t the only one trying to take the guesswork out of meal planning. eMeals, a subscription-based meal planning and shopping service, partnered with publishing powerhouse Meredith Corporation last year. Across the pond, Mucho does something very similar. And in the B2B space, Lighter provides plant-based meal planning services to the healthcare industry and athletes. Ends & Stems’ food waste angle is a smart way to stand out, and might indeed end up saving users time and money while keeping food out of the landfill. But Mountford is up against bigger, more established competitors with entire tech teams and high-level partners. She could also be hurt by the lack of shoppable recipe capabilities and her resistance to a mobile app, which can help increase consumer engagement. Competition aside, I’m not sure how big the user potential is for meal planning services in general. In a world filled with the (near) instant satisfaction of food delivery or in-retail meal kits, services that only send you recipes and aggregate shopping lists can seem a little, well, antiquated. Then again, as of now Mountford has so little overhead that I’m guessing she doesn’t need a huge number of users to make the company successful. As of its launch, Ends & Stems had 100 paying beta users. Time will tell if Mountford’s passion and scrappiness can help grow that number — and also shrink food waste.