A while back I had a friend who was a manager at a grocery store. I was curious about his job and while he was telling me about it, he told me about how much food the supermarket was throwing away. They couldn’t send it to the food bank either because if they get sick with it they could sue the supermarket.
Up to a third of the food produced in the world is wasted, forty percent of food produced in America heads to the landfill or is otherwise wasted.
And this has an economic and environmental impact too. Every year, the average American family throws out somewhere between $1,365 and $2,275, according to a landmark 2013 study co-authored by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
According to the same study, 25 percent of freshwater in the US goes toward producing food that goes uneaten, and 21 percent of input to our landfills is food, which represents a per-capita increase of 50 percent since 1974.
This problem led several governments to pass laws to prevent supermarkets from throwing away food.
Others started apps to offer food that is going to expire at a bargain, like flashfood and Ubifood.
With recent rising food prices, Canadians are flocking to these apps in an effort to curb rising grocery bills.
Is your local grocery shop using this kind of app? If not you could build one for them, maybe have a deal to take a cut of the sale or a subscription fee business for the grocer, where he pays to send alerts to the app users. You could probably get some government funding for that kind of app too.
More information & links:
https://www.flashfood.com/blog/why-grocery-stores-dont-donate-all-of-their-surplus-food-to-charity
https://www.vox.com/22559293/food-waste-expiration-label-best-before
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/leftover-food-flashfood-app-1.3704145
https://www.quora.com/What-do-supermarkets-do-with-food-items-that-have-passed-their-expiry-date
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