What can we do to reduce food waste?

Well – we’ve all carved our pumpkins and wondered what we should do with them post Halloween and Thanksgiving right??

There’s been regular chat in some of the Zero Waste forums about making pumpkin curries, and pesto made from the pumpkin seeds (nice!) and even the more obscure pumpkin seed art – very pretty….

We recently chatted with Anoushka at ‘too good to go’ … a social enterprise app reducing food waste by linking you with food that would otherwise be wasted.

Anoushka, let’s open this with some startling food waste stats please:

· If food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the USA and China

· Food waste cost the UK an estimated £19bn in 2015 – more than the government’s police and education budget

· UK restaurants waste 600,000 tonnes of edible food every year – that’s the equivalent of 84 Eiffel Towers

· If we all stopped wasting food that could be eaten, the benefit to our planet would be the equivalent of taking one in four cars off the road

What is Too Good To Go?

We’re a social enterprise trying to highlight the scale of food waste and place the value back onto food as something that should be eaten, not thrown away.

To do this, we’ve partnered with restaurants, cafes and bakeries to make their surplus food – the perfectly good stuff that would otherwise be thrown away – available for collection via our Too Good To Go mobile app at their end of service for a reduced price.

How did the idea come about?

The idea came about as a solution to tackling food waste in the hospitality industry, the app was founded with a mission to place the lost value back onto food as something that should be eaten and not thrown away.

It’s a response to the harrowing fact that as a global society, we carelessly throw away over one-third of the food we produce at the same time as watching one billion people go to bed hungry every night. We’re trying to highlight that food is food – our most valuable resource of energy – and not a mere consumer commodity.

How did Too Good To Go start?

Too Good To Go started back in 2015 as a website, with co-founders Jamie and Chris looking to address the crazy problem of food waste that we have here in the UK.

After launching the site and getting going, they met a few Danish guys who were wanting to address the same issue in Scandinavia. From sharing the same passion of addressing this global issue they joined forces and created the app known as Too Good To Go that we see today!

How many meals has Too Good To Go saved?

Too Good To Go has now saved over 2 million meals, with 10,000 of these being in the UK.

How many partner stores are on Too Good To Go?

We have 7,000 stores on the app, with 1000 of them being in the UK specifically.

Why should I use the app?

The app is not just a chance to enjoy a great meal at an affordable price or be introduced to new places, but more importantly it is a reaction to a world which has been confused by use-by, sell-by, best-before and expiry dates.

By ordering through Too Good To Go, we’re showing that it is possible to use our resources in a more sustainable manner; we’re proving that we can cope with high population growth by making better use of what we already have and perhaps, next time we’re doing our weekly shop, we’ll even stop to think ‘will I actually use these strawberries before they go bad’?

To Good To Go is more than a food app – we want to be an informative, educational platform that raises awareness of food waste and changes our mindset towards it – and that’s what we want our users to realise first and foremost.

Find out more here: toogoodtogo.co.uk

#TooGoodToGo