Too Good To Go, a food-rescue app, has convinced restaurants in six countries to sell end-of-the-day food at a discount to hungry locals in an effort to reduce food waste. The six-month-old app has a major presence in the UK, with a waitlist of 95 London eateries anticipating its August launch, Eater writes.
“It costs restaurants on average 97p ($1.26) for every meal they throw away so we are saving them that expense and giving them extra and we provide them with all packaging so they have recyclable and eco-friendly boxes,” Co-founder Chris Wilson told the Evening Standard. The only catch is that customers can only pick up food an hour before closing.
Wilson says it’s a win-win for customers, who can fill a to-go box of fresh leftovers from their favorite restaurants for $2.60 to $5, but also for UK restaurants that collectively trash 600,000 tonnes of edible food a year, individually costing them more than $26,000, Newsweek writes. Too Good To Go also boasts deflecting over 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions caused from discarded food.
Food waste is a hot political issue. Italy this month passed a law to cut 1 million tonnes of food waste, and in February, France became the first to ban supermarkets from destroying unsold food. Meanwhile, Congress is considering the Food Recovery Act of 2015. Small steps by online communities like Baltimore’s Hungry Harvest, which delivers recovered bounties of “ugly” produce, and databases like UK’s Winnow, which estimates the cost of food waste for restaurants, are some rising stars in bottom-up solutions.