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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

food redistribution

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. 

Surplus Food Marketplace Too Good to Go Raises $31M to Expand in the U.S.

Copenhagen, Denmark-based Too Good to Go announced today it has raised €25.7 million (~$31 million) to expand its surplus food marketplace that fights food waste. The investment was led by /blisce, with participation from existing investors and employees. 

Too Good to Go’s main mission is fighting food waste. The company partners with hotels, restaurants, supermarkets, and other businesses that have surplus food items at the end of each day. Those businesses can list food on Too Good to Go’s B2C marketplace at discounted prices. Consumers then simply browse the marketplace via the Too Good to Go app or website, place an order, and retrieve their food from the merchant at a designated time.

Too Good to Go already operates in 15 countries around the world, including several in Europe, including the U.K., Spain, and Italy. The expansion enabled by this new funding will focus mainly on the U.S., where the company has a smaller presence. It launched in New York City and Boston in September 2020, and has since also moved into parts of New Jersey. Specific cities and locations for this latest expansion were not named, though Too Good to Go’s roster of partners includes everyone from local grocers to massive chains like Hilton, Coop, Le Pain Quotidien, Yo! Sushi, and many others.

Surplus food marketplaces are not as prevalent in the U.S. as they are in other countries, despite the fact that the majority of food waste in this country happens at consumer-facing levels. Flashfood, a Canada-based company that offers a similar surplus food business, operates in some parts of the U.S. Karma is another Scandinavia-based surplus food app, but as yet it does not have a presence in the U.S.

All of which is to say, the opportunity is still wide open for Too Good to Go and other companies bringing the surplus food concept Stateside. 

Imperfect Foods’ New Snack Box Lets You Fight Food Waste Through Holiday Gifting

A key tactic for fighting food waste at the consumer level is to incentivize folks with easy, affordable solutions that don’t require a whole lot of work. Bundling food-waste-fighting concepts into holiday gift ideas seems like one surefire way to do that, and it’s something food redistribution platform Imperfect Foods will be doing in 2020. The company today announced the launch of its first-ever holiday gift box containing a mix of so-called “imperfect” snack items, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

Imperfect, which raised $72 million earlier this year, “rescues” surplus and cosmetically imperfect food items from grocery stores and delivers them to consumers at discounted prices. That includes fruits, vegetables, and pantry items as well as meat and dairy. 

It follows, then, that all snack items included in the newly announced holiday gift box come with their own rescue stories. Those include:

  • Dried mango considered too “sunburnt” to sell at grocery
  • Almond butter toffee that broke into pieces
  • Peppermint- and dark chocolate-covered pretzels that broke into pieces during production
  • Surplus seasonings
  • Leftover snack mix bits like peanuts, pretzels, and sesame sticks
  • Almonds with “blemishes”

While the above list would satisfy most snack lovers’ cravings, it more importantly offers a quick snapshot of the many ridiculous reasons retailers throw food out — food that could otherwise be purchased for lower prices or given to those without access or means to regular grocery store items. In high-income countries like the U.S. and many places in Europe, the majority — more than 80 percent — of food waste happens at consumer-facing levels like retail. Needless to say, there are a lot of blemished almonds out there that need a home, and a lot of people in the country who could benefit from keeping them out of the landfill.

Nor is Imperfect the only food rescue service out there. Two other notables include Misfits Market, which operates similar to Imperfect and recently raised $85 million, and Flashfood, a Canada-based service that currently works with Meijer grocery chains to rescue food.

Packaging rescued snack items as holiday goodies may also be a way for a company like Imperfect to make the concept of fighting food waste more appealing and, well, fun. No other food waste apps besides Imperfect have yet to surface with a holiday offering, though it wouldn’t be surprising if they did over the next few weeks.

The Imperfect Foods Holiday Box will be available for both Imperfect subscribers and nonmembers for $24.99 starting November 16. The company said in today’s press release will save about nine pounds of food from going to waste. Proceeds from the boxes go towards Feeding America.  

‘Make Food Waste Less Possible’: How Businesses Can Help Consumers Fight Food Waste at Home

Tackling the food waste topic in a 30-minute panel is something of an impossible undertaking, given the size of the problem. That’s why at Day 2 of Smart Kitchen Summit 2020, myself, Apeel Sciences’ CEO James Rogers, Chiara Cecchini of the Future Food Institute, and Alexandria Coari of ReFED zeroed in on a few major causes and solutions around food waste.

One of those was the role of consumer behavior in the fight against food waste. Right now, according to ReFed, 80-plus percent of food waste in the U.S. happens at the consumer level, with more than 40 percent of that occurring in our own homes. But is it even realistic to expect consumers — for whom convenience and speed tend to be top priorities — to alter their behaviors around cooking, shopping, and eating in order to bring that number down?

Maybe. But as panelists explained during today’s talk, one of the keys to changing consumer behavior belongs not to the individual but to consumer-facing food businesses — the grocery stores, restaurants, and other retailers of the world.

Coari pointed out that these food businesses have a lot of influence up and down the value chain. Those businesses can enable consumer behavior change by making their environments, whether in the store or in the restaurant, less conducive to food waste to begin with. They can, as Coari said, “Make food waste less possible.”

Apeel, which makes a natural coating for produce to extend its shelf life, is one such example. Selling, say, avocados preserved in Apeel’s coating means consumers have more time between buying the product and eating it at home. Extending this lifespan, there’s a better chance the avocado will get eaten before it goes bad.

Neither the coating nor the extra several days of shelf-life happen because of anything a consumer does. They’re just buying the avocado. Instead, Apeel has used a technology and process that allow a consumer to get more mileage out of the food they buy.

Cecchini pointed out that educating consumers and helping them shift their perspective around certain foods is another important area of consumer behavior change. Take the so-called ugly produce: misshapen-yet-edible fruits and vegetables that are often sold at discounted prices. Cecchini suggests removing monikers like “ugly” or “imperfect” from the food waste vocabulary and trying to put a more positive spin on the concept to make it appeal to as many consumers as possible. In that way, grocery retailers, too, might not have to put as much effort into cosmetically perfect produce and wind up throwing out the rest.

There are tons of other examples of business innovation influencing food waste behavior at the consumer level. While we certainly didn’t cover all of them in the span of a half-hour, today’s talk certainly left me thinking about what food businesses can do to help us get more mileage out of the food we have and waste less of it in the process. As Rogers said at one point, “We can’t hope people [will] do the right thing. We have to make the right thing the easiest, cheapest, best for the planet thing to do.”

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. 

Surplus Food Startup Hungry Harvest Closes Series A Round at $13.7M

Food rescue startup Hungry Harvest has closed its Series A round at $13.7 million, according to a company press release. The round was led by Creadev with participation from Danone Manifesto Ventures, Quadia, and Maywic Select Investments.

Hungry Harvest is one of several companies out there rescuing “ugly” produce and other staples from groceries in an effort to curb food waste and redistribute food to those in need. The company collects fruits, vegetables, and other items deemed cosmetically unfit for mainstream retailers and packs them into variety boxes customers can order and have delivered to their doorsteps. Users can customize their boxes based on how often they cook, how many people they are feeding, and whether they prefer organic produce or will eat anything. Boxes range in price from $15 for a “Mini Harvest” all the way up to $42 for a “Super Organic Harvest.”

The company also donates to local organizations fighting food insecurity in the U.S. Hungry Harvest says it plans to use the new funds to improve the customer experience for its products and scale its social mission of getting affordable food to those in need. 

The concept of rescuing ugly produce from landfills has steadily grown in popularity over the last couple years as the world’s multibillion-dollar food waste problem becomes more top of mind for more consumers. Those consumers now have ample options when it comes to purchasing cheaper produce that would get tossed at a grocery store, including Karma, Imperfect Produce, and Misfits Market. Some of these companies are actually partnering with grocery stores, as Flashfood is doing with Meijer stores in Detroit. 

For it’s part, Hungry Harvest currently delivers to Baltimore, D.C., Philadelphia, Charlotte, Raleigh, Miami and Detroit.