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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

surplus

YourLocal’s App Sells Super-Discounted Surplus Food from Local Restaurants

At the end of the day, the majority of restaurants end up having to toss whatever pre-prepared meals are left unsold. When foodservice establishments have razor-thin margins to begin with, any level of waste can seriously hurt their bottom line.

YourLocal is trying to help restaurants cut waste and pocket more money with an app that lets consumers purchase extremely discounted surplus food from local eateries. Users download the app, put in their location, and can browse a list of discounted meals from nearby restaurants. All selections are marked down by at least 50 percent. Users can select and pay for their food online, but have to go to the actual restaurant to pick up their selection within a given time frame.

Sounds like a smart idea, right? Restaurants get to make more money off of food that would be headed for the trash, and people get to eat their favorite foods for less. That’s probably why YourLocal isn’t the first to offer this kind of service.

In Europe, there are already several startups peddling reduced-price surplus food. The largest one, TooGoodToGo, is based in Copenhagen and serves nine countries in Europe. Karma, which started in Sweden but has spread into the U.K., is another service selling marked-down food from restaurants and grocery stores.

YourLocal was actually founded three years ago in Copenhagen, right around the corner from TooGoodToGo. However, while TooGoodToGo is expanding across Europe, YourLocal recently opened up a New York office to attend the Food-X accelerator program and launch in the U.S. — where they’re planning to grow next.

The main reason is that, in America, the market is far less saturated. The closest competitor, FoodForAll, started in Boston and just launched in the New York market last year. However, YourLocal hopes that it can leverage its experience in Europe to grow faster and cement itself as a market leader. But the bigger question is are U.S. consumers ready to embrace the concept of buying extra food from restaurants?

“In Europe, the idea of surplus food isn’t hard to grasp,” YourLocal’s Head of Growth, Daniel Ratner, told me during a visit to the Food-X headquarters last week. Here in the U.S., however, people might envision sad soggy sandwiches or questionable sushi when they think about leftover restaurant offerings. Ratner and his team are trying to shift the idea of what “surplus” means by selling only high-quality foods, showing consumers that extra doesn’t necessarily mean second-rate.

YourLocal’s other emphasis is simplicity. Ratner said they want to make the purchasing experience as frictionless as possible, so consumers genuinely consider YourLocal an easy alternative to ordering takeout or swinging by a local restaurant for takeaway food. “People want to be socially responsible and thrifty, but it has to be simple,” he told me.

YourLocal currently has a team of 6 and has raised an undisclosed amount of funds from Danish investors. As of now it works with hundreds of restaurants in Denmark and around 100 shops in New York City, where it’s focusing its expansion efforts, and is about to cross the 10,000 meal mark there. The app is free to use for consumers, and the company takes a cut from its retail partners for each transaction.

Some have argued that resale services like YourLocal take food away from services that feed the truly hungry, like soup kitchens or shelters. However, Ratner told me that smaller local restaurants often don’t have enough surplus to actually donate to relief organizations. He gave the example of City Harvest, a NYC-based food rescue organization which can only accept food donations weighing over 100 pounds. Smaller restaurants also likely can’t pay an employee to go drop off leftovers at a local shelter, which means that their extras just end up in a landfill. For these smaller restaurants, additional sales channels like YourLocal could be a way to cut down on waste while making a few extra bucks.

We at The Spoon are big fans of simple strategies to cut down on food waste. While YourLocal’s concept isn’t original, it would be the first to really bring the surplus restaurant food resale business to the U.S. in a meaningful way. If successful, it’ll be a win for restaurants — and hungry folks who love a good deal.

Beyond Food Uses Giant Metal Pods to Turn Surplus Fruit into Vegan Protein Powder

Considering the amount of food wasted in North America (that’s 170 million tons per year), we need more people willing to get up and do something to keep all that perfectly good food from going into the landfill in the first place.

That’s exactly what Dr. Darren Burke and TJ Galiardi did a little over three years ago. The pair was discussing the absurd amount of food waste in North America’s landfills, and out of that frustration came the idea for Beyond Food (no, not affiliated with Beyond Meat). Using a cutting-edge technology developed in-house, the company rescues produce from grocery stores destined for the trash and upcycles it into consumer products.

“We asked ourselves, How could we figure out how to upcycle this potential burden on the planet, and turn it into something of high value?” Dr. Burke, CEO of Beyond Food, told me over the phone.

The Halifax, Nova Scotia-based company’s first product is a plant-based nutrition powder. It launched with Canada retailers in September of 2018. Each 30-gram scoop (one serving) contains 20 grams of protein and six servings of fruits and vegetables.

All of that protein isn’t coming just from upcycled produce; Beyond Food adds protein from pulses (think: pea protein) into their powder. As of now the company purchases the protein from a supplier, but Dr. Burke told me that eventually they hope to make their own.

A two-pound container of the powder costs $69.99 CAD ($59.99 USD) and is available in over 1,000 stores throughout Canada; the company plans to expand into the U.S. over the next few months. Currently, Beyond Food targets athletes, but they eventually want to expand outside the sports vertical and develop upcycled products for the snacks and wellness markets.

The plant-based protein powder aspect is interesting, but it isn’t really the point of Beyond Food. Dr. Burke was insistent that the company’s main technology has “much larger implications” than just making a few CPG products from old fruits and vegetables. That’s where the company’s Zero Waste Pod comes into play.

The pod is a closed-loop system: put fresh fruit and vegetables in, and it spits out dehydrated produce powder. Water extracted from the produce can be saved and used to irrigate crops. Dr. Burke wouldn’t go too far into the technical workings of the pod, but I’m imagining a higher-tech, much-bigger version of the machines in grocery stores that grind up coffee beans or peanut butter.

Beyond Food only has a prototype pod right now, but they intend to set up a fleet of pods within grocery partners’ warehouses, doing away with the need to ship fragile, almost-rotten fruit and vegetables to a central processing hub. “We have to be in the location where the waste is being produced in order to do this the right way,” said Burke.

The company will sell the pods to grocers, who will feed in their surplus produce to reduce food waste and do away with the cost of having to pay a company to truck the rotten produce to a landfill. Beyond Food will then pick up the resulting powder, though the grocer will get credits to use a percentage of the powder to either sell to one of their brands or use to develop their own white-label product, should they so choose.

Beyond Food plans to deploy its first pod in September of 2019. The company has $3 million CAD ($2.26 million US) in funding, mostly from friends and family and government support, including a $1 million raise last November.

I have to wonder about the long term viability of Beyond Food’s mission. After all, there are several companies already working to reduce waste further up the supply chain. Spoiler Alert helps food manufacturers and distributors better manage inventory to reduce waste. And on the grocer side, Farmstead and Afresh use AI to optimize fresh food stocking and reduce surplus, while over in Europe Karma and Electrolux have teamed up to install smart fridges in grocery stores to sell food destined for the landfill. If these initiatives take a large enough bite out of food waste, there might not be enough late in life produce for Beyond to make their business model viable.

Since Dr. Burke didn’t disclose pricing details, it’s hard to tell if the cost will be low enough to make the hassle of adding a large pod into a warehouse and managing it worth the extra workload for grocery companies. Then again, ReFED reported that food waste is an $18.2 billion profit opportunity for grocery retailers, so paying a price to upcycle said waste just might be worth taking some action after all.