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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Flashfood

Flashfood Partners With Giant to Bring Its Food Waste App to More Grocery Stores

Up to now, Flashfood’s surplus grocery/food waste-fighting service has enjoyed a noteworthy but fairly small presence among American consumers. New developments are set to change that. The Canada-based company recently announced an expansion with The Giant Company that will make the Flashfood app and service available in many more grocery stores across the U.S.

Carlisle, Pennsylvania-based Giant (part of Ahold Delhaize USA), operates grocery stores in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. The company trialed Flashfood’s service at four stores beginning in 2020. Flashfood CEO Josh Domingues said that after some initial hesitation (Giant originally said no to the partnership), the store saw a measurable reduction in food waste, net new customers at the store, and customers spending more money while in the store. Domingues did not provide exact numbers for that deal, but said that overall his company’s service has diverted 25 million pounds of food from the landfill and saved shoppers over $70 million.

The Giant partnership will eventually reach all Giant stores as well as Giant subsidiary Martin’s stores. For now, the Flashfood service is available in more than 30 stores, with a plan to be in 170 stores by fall 2021. 

Flashfood’s service lets consumers buy meat, dairy, produce, and other items that are nearing their sell-by dates at 50 percent of the retail cost. Historically, grocery retailers have thrown out food that’s about to expire, and most still do. However, efforts to reduce food waste at the retail level have increased over the last decade. From that change has come a pack of companies that will “rescue” surplus, ugly, or expiring food and sell it directly to consumers. Imperfect Foods and Misfits Market both started out rescuing produce. Both companies are now full-blown e-commerce grocery stores. Another notable company is Too Good to Go, which resells surplus food from restaurants, is expanding across the U.S.  

Flashfood sticks mainly to the grocery store at this point. Users download the Flashfood app and can browse available food at participating grocery stores in their area. The most commonly sold items, says Domingues, are dairy and produce. Meat is another good seller, and “mystery boxes” — shoebox-sized packages of mixed items — are also hugely popular. 

Once the customer has placed an order, a store shopper gathers the items, scans them, and places them in the “Flashfood zone” which is just a temperature-controlled case for food that’s usually located at the front of the store. Customers pick their items up the same day they place the order.

Outside of the Flashfood app itself, the operation is intentionally simple. There are no QR codes or smartphones needed to automatically unlock the fridge door, nor is there automated self-service check-in of any kind. Once a user arrives at the store, they simply head to customer service, where a human being helps them retrieve their order.

“It’s very difficult to be simple with technology,” Domingues says, suggesting that the complexity and “potential frustration” more tech could mean for the store employees is not worth it at the moment. “The mission is to reduce food waste and to feed families more affordable. The vessel that we’re doing that through is with an app and a partnership with our grocery stores.”

Instead, for now, Flashfood will continue its focus on grocery stores. The Giant rollout follows an expanded deal with Meijer Flashfood struck earlier this year. Flashfood is also in Hy-Vee stores in Wisconsin, and is, of course, available across Canada. The company plans to make its service available at more U.S. stores in the near future. 

Meijer and Flashfood Expand Food Waste Program Across Grocery Stores

Grocery chain Meijer announced this week it is on track to complete its food waste reduction program with Flashfood this year, with plans to expand the initiative across all Meijer stores in the Midwest.

The program, which involves customers buying surplus Meijer food via the Flashfood app, originally launched in 2019 and was slated for a wider expansion in 2020. That expansion was delayed when COVID-19 hit, but Meijer is now expanding the program from its original Detroit, Michigan location to Illinois, Kentucky, Ohio, Wisconsin, and the rest of Michigan. 

Flashfood, headquartered in Toronto, Ontario in Canada, also has “Flashfood zones” available in multiple provinces across Canada as well as in New York and Pennsylvania. The company works with grocery retailers to rescue surplus or cosmetically imperfect foods that would ordinarily go to the landfill.

From the consumer side, users first select their grocery store on the Flashfood app and set it as their location. They can then browse the foods available for purchase via the Flashfood program. Since these items are either surplus or unsellable (for cosmetic reasons) on the stores regular shelves, they are usually priced at a discount, sometimes 50 percent lower.

After selecting and paying for food, the user heads to their designated grocery store and confirms their order with a customer service or staff person. From there, they can retrieve their items from a Flashfood fridge, which is usually kept at the front of the store. As of right now, the process is somewhat manual, since users have to confirm their order with a human being at the store, rather than simply unlocking the fridge with a QR or text code via their smartphone.

The concept of rescuing then reselling cosmetically imperfect produce from the grocery store was, until recently, a fairly niche market in the U.S. The last year has seen the category expand, however. Too Good to Go launched in certain U.S. markets, while Imperfect Foods expanded its grocery e-commerce platform to include pantry staples, meat, and dairy items, in addition to rescued produce. Likewise, Misfits Market runs a robust e-commerce platform in the U.S. for reselling surplus food from grocery stores.

Flashfood’s partnership with Meijer, and this current expansion, will give Flashfood substantially more visibility in parts of the U.S. While the company has not confirmed as much, this could lead to partnerships with other major American grocery retailers in the future.

Food Waste App Too Good to Go Makes Its U.S. Debut in NYC

Food redistribution app Too Good to Go made its U.S. debut today in New York City. With it, restaurants, cafes, and markets in the Big Apple can redistribute to consumers their surplus goods that would otherwise go to the landfill.

Copenhagen, Denmark-based Too Good to Go already has a presence in several markets around Europe, including the U.K., Spain, France, and Italy. The app acts as a marketplace for surplus food, where businesses can post their leftover food at a discount. Users then search among the local restaurants and grocery stores listed on the app, place and order, and retrieve their food from the merchant.

The NYC launch coincides with the UN’s first-ever International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste, which is today. New York, meanwhile, makes for an appropriate place for a food-waste-fighting app. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that average NYC households waste 8.4 pounds of food per week. Too Good to Go’s own recent survey found that while 86 percent of the city-area residents want to waste less food, 88 percent don’t realize the connection between food waste and climate change. And as we outlined in a recent food waste report on Spoon Plus, food waste’s global carbon footprint right now is about 3.3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gases.

So far, food redistribution apps that directly connect the consumer and the retailer are few and far between in the U.S. Canada-based Flashfood app teamed up with Meijer grocery stores in last year to sell the chain’s surplus food in the Midwest U.S. So far, however, the market in this country is ripe for new entrants. 

Too Good to Go says it already has “nearly 200” merchant partners signed up, including Stumptown Coffee, Prince St Pizza, and Brooklyn Fare. 

Flashfood Teams Up With Meijer Grocery Chain to Cut In-Store Food Waste

U.S. grocery chain Meijer has teamed up with the folks at Flashfood to cut down on food waste in its Detroit-area stores.

Using Canada-based Flashfood’s app, grocery stores can sell surplus food nearing its expiration date at discounted prices, including not just produce but also meat, seafood, dairy, and bakery items. Customers can download the Flashfood app, choose a store, then select and pay for items from their phone, much as they would with any other online grocery platform. Items are available for pickup at the store. As of yet, Flashfood has no accompanying delivery service.

For the Meijer deal, Flashfood will sell items at up 50 percent off the original price. The two companies are testing the program in Metro Detroit, where Flashfood currently works with four Meijer stores.

The model of selling near-expired food items at discounted prices to consumers comes with a number of benefits. Stores waste less inventory and therefore waste less money, and consumers can save some cash by choosing the discounted food items. There’s also the fact that 40 percent of food in the U.S. goes to waste, a truth uglier than a misshapen tomato. Companies like Flashfood and Meijer, who are working to redistribute unused inventory, are in part targeting that issue with their solutions.

Flashfood’s approach to food waste is not unlike that of Karma, a Swedish company that helps retailers sell excess food via a mobile app and which recently teamed up with Electrolux to store that unsold food in smart refrigerators at retailers.

However, Karma is only available in Europe — as are the majority of other food-surplus startups. In the U.S., the concept remains a fairly niche one, and the market is, as my colleague Catherine Lamb recently wrote, “far less saturated” in the States than in Europe.

Meanwhile, Flashfood itself has more a presence in Canada, where it is based, with just the Detroit locations and a few Hy-Vee stores in Wisconsin. The hope is that the deal with Meijer, a chain that operates throughout the U.S. Midwest, can familiarize more of the population with new ways to curb food waste. Helping them save money in the process never hurts.

Are In-Store Fridges for Selling Food Near its Expiration Date Becoming a Thing?

I know there’s supposed to be three of something before it becomes a trend. But there are now two startups using almost the exact same combination of apps and special fridges in grocery stores to sell food nearing its expiration date at a discount, and I don’t think we have to wait for a third.

Supermarket News reports that grocer Hy-Vee has started a pilot program with Toronto-based company Flashfood in which Hy-Vee will sell food nearing its expiration date at a discounted rate via in-store fridges. From the story:

To use Flashfood, customers download the free app (available in iOS and Android versions) and then start shopping deals on items such as meat, dairy, bread and snacks. Purchases are then made directly from their smartphone and picked up at any time from the Flashfood Zone shelves or refrigerators in the store.

If that sounds familiar, thank you for being an avid reader of The Spoon! Back in November I wrote about a partnership between Swedish appliance giant, Electrolux and food waste fighting startup (and fellow Swedes) Karma to sell food nearing its expiration date at a discounted rate. From that story:

The fridge acts as a locker/waystation where unsold food that would otherwise be thrown away is held. Karma users can purchase that food through the Karma app, then pick it up from the new smart fridge in the store. The user unlocks the fridge by displaying a QR code and shows the product at checkout to complete the transaction.

According to the press announcement, the Hy-Vee/Flashfood program is currently running in three stores in Wisconsin. The Electrolux/Karma fridge was testing in Stockholm, Sweden.

Just to be clear, I’m not accusing anyone of stealing anyone’s idea (Wasteless is another company working with grocery stores for dynamic pricing). The point is, if two companies on different sides of the globe can bring together fighting food waste with app and discounts, let’s hope there is a third, fourth, and even fifth company trying to make it happen as well.

Flashfood and Tyson Partner to Fight Food Waste and Help Food Deserts

If you’re even vaguely interested in the issue of food waste, you’ve probably got the vital stats memorized by now: Forty percent of U.S. food goes to waste. Food waste costs the world $1 trillion annually. And my personal (least) favorite: in the U.S., we waste enough food to fill a college football stadium. Meanwhile, there are 793 million people on earth (PDF) who are starving, and 42.2 Americans living in food deserts (areas without easy access to fresh and healthy food). Not to get all didactic, but something’s definitely rotten in the state of modern food.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. In fact, we’re now in an era where people and organizations aren’t just talking (or writing) about these issues; they’re actually working to fix them.

One such project is the recently announced partnership between Flashfood and Tyson (hat-tip to Fooddive). Together, the two are offering U.S. customers boxes of surplus foods through a direct-to-consumer e-commerce program called flashfoodbox. The 90-day pilot program just kicked off in Detroit, on Earth Day (April 22).

Flashfood successfully runs a similar program (Tyson is not involved) in its native Canada. Tyson, meanwhile, has been donating surplus food to various organizations for years.

Flashfood works directly with the farmers to select produce for the boxes, while Tyson’s role is to donate surplus meats that are perfectly safe to eat but can’t be sold in U.S. grocery stores (e.g., improperly cut chicken breasts). Produce comes from greenhouse growers and farmers across the U.S. “This is all Farm Fresh product, equally as fresh as what you’d see in the store, just rejected from retailers for aesthetic reasons,” says Flashfood CEO and founder, Josh Domingues. After selecting and receiving the food, Flashfood packages and ships the boxes.

To get a box, interested folks can head to the Flashfood website or app, where they have the option to make either a one-time purchase for $44.99 or buy a subscription for 10 percent less. Each box is temperature controlled and contains 15 pounds of surplus food: a combination of produce and protein. Customers can also purchase a box as a donation to Detroit-based food rescue program Forgotten Harvest. The site offers recipes to use when cooking the surplus food.

The catalyst for Flashfood was a phone call Domingues had with his sister, a chef, who had just wrapped a catering event by throwing out $4,000 worth of unused food. After much more reading and research on the topic, Domingues, who worked in finance at the time, found himself pondering the idea of an app specifically designed to help people find unwanted food from restaurants, grocers, and farmers, then sell that food at heavily discounted prices. “I thought about how many other people could benefit,” he says. Young families, students, recent grads with $50,000 worth of debt . . . the list goes on. And, of course, at the top of that list are those living in food deserts — that is, areas where access to fresh, quality food is uncertain and inconsistent.

“Food deserts are a result of city builds based on wealth distribution,” says Domingues. “And when people live outside certain boundaries, they don’t have access to fresh food.”

Why Detroit? “[We want] a city that we think could really benefit people and provide them with fresh produce and protein,” Domingues explains. “Detroit is going through a really fascinating resurgence and we want to be there for it. It’s a city that’s right across the border from Canada. It’s a city that not a lot of tech companies would target.”

The fact that Flashfood is targeting cities that aren’t, in Domingues’ words, “sexy” for tech companies to set up shop is an important part of their overall mission. While the company isn’t actively avoiding the San Franciscos and Austins of the world, getting in on the action, so to speak, in the startup world is not a priority. For Flashfood, the action lies elsewhere: “Sure there’s technology involved in what we’re building, but this is much more technology,” he says. “We’re building a marketplace to fix the failure of modern day food.”

 

Wasting Enough Food to Fill a Stadium? One of These Apps Could Help

Earlier this year, I wrote that the U.S. wastes enough food each year to fill a college football stadium. Meanwhile, on a global level, about one third of the food produced for human consumption gets thrown away. And sometimes it’s for seemingly pointless reasons, like grocery stores throwing out pineapples with crooked tops.

Grocery stores aren’t alone; restaurants, catering companies, and schools, not to mention consumers, all contribute to this stadium-sized food waste problem.

Which is where mobile apps could help. While they’re not the only food waste technology out there, apps have a relatively simple — but effective — mission: cut food waste by connecting the ones with too much food (restaurants, grocers) with those who either need food or want to pay less for it. And a number of these apps now play specific roles, from supplying food-insecure areas with produce to connecting buyers with local food or simply giving city dwellers a cheaper option for dinner.

Below are just a few of the companies and apps worth noting and, should they serve your area, using to source your dinner. Note this isn’t a comprehensive list, and I’ve doubtless left off some big ones. Feel free to share ‘em in the comments below.

BuffetGo

As its name suggests, BuffetGo works with lots of markets and buffet-style restaurants, offering consumers insanely discounted prices on leftover breakfast, lunch, and dinner items.

To get food just search within your area on the app, choose a restaurant, and purchase a voucher. (The average price is $5.) The app then designates specific time windows for you to pick food up (usually after the lunch rush or at closing time in the evening/night). You don’t have to purchase a specific meal. Instead, you show up, grab a to-go container, and fill it up as much or as little as you like.

Flashfood

This Canadian company keeps edibles out of landfills by offering them for pickup or delivery.

Participating grocery stores can sell items nearing their expiration date (which would normally be thrown out) through the Flashfood app at discounted prices. Consumers choose the food they want from selections posted to the app, where they also pay for it. They pick the food up directly from the store. At the moment, it looks like the service is only available in Canadian stores.

Flashfood’s other food waste reduction method is compiling boxes of “not-good-enough” food (ahem, pineapples) and shipping them direct to consumers. The contents of the box vary depending on what’s available/not wanted in any given week. Flashfood delivers in Canada as well as Detroit at the moment, and plans to expand to other U.S. cities soon. (In the meantime, U.S. consumers have Imperfect Produce to supply their needs.)

Food For All

If you’re in Boston or NYC, Food For All will sell you discounted meals from local joints. You just have to pick the food up at a designated time.

The company started in collaboration with the Harvard T.H Chan School of Public Health in 2016. It partners with a pretty wide range of places, from tapas, Indian and Latin American restaurants to bakeries to a marshmallow shop. I’ve tried the app and found that it’s especially handy in finding things I wouldn’t normally pay full price for, like a bottle of cold-pressed juice.

Participating restaurants can also use the app to donate a set number of meals to homeless shelters and other charity organizations.

Food Rescue US

Food Rescue has a proprietary mobile system it uses to match food donors (grocery stores, restaurants, etc.) with receiving agencies in food-insecure areas. So, for example, the algorithm might match a participating deli with a nearby homeless shelter or soup kitchen.

Food Rescue delivers the items directly to the receiving agency via volunteer drivers. These drivers — called “food rescuers” — operate much like Lyft drivers, using a map to see available pickups and selecting the ones that are closest or make the most sense for them to pick up. Anyone can become a volunteer driver, regardless of what sort of vehicle they drive or how often they’re available.

Food Rescue operates in multiple states right now, including Connecticut, Florida, New Mexico, Ohio, South Carolina.

goMkt

This company is basically a food marketplace in app form: cafes, bakeries, restaurants, and delis can use it as a platform on which to post unsold inventory. Users browse what’s on offer or get notified when food becomes available in their area. As with other apps, users pay within the app and can then pick the food up for a heavily discounted price.

According to a recent interview, goMkt will soon launch a B2B version of its app geared towards wholesalers, manufacturers, and large supermarket groups.

A bigger waste problem

One thing that will definitely need to be addressed in the future: packaging. While that’s a post for another day, it’s worth noting that a lot of these restaurants still use to-go cartons made from Styrofoam or other harmful materials. Yes, we need to tackle the actual food part of food waste first. At some point, though, we’ll need to broaden the definition of “waste” in order to address the market as a whole.