Community Food Waste Sharing

[LaLeonie]

Name
Leonie

Describe the problem you'd like to solve
There are two problems I'd like to solve:

1. Food waste/surplus: Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of good food is wasted by the UK food industry every year. A significant proportion of food waste is produced by the domestic household and a majority of wasted food is avoidable.

2. Loneliness: Britain has been voted the loneliness capital of Europe. A survey by the Office for National Statistics found that Britains are less likely to have strong friendships or know their neighbours than inhabitants of any other country in the EU

We've all been there before. You find half a pot of mascarpone in your fridge one day before its use-by date. So to avoid it being wasted, you rush to the shop, bag some biscuits, marsala and double cream and whizz up a delicious Tiramisu for yourself and your flatmate. Now, unless you're four months pregnant at that time, you'll find that you don't manage to eat the entire Tiramisu by yourselves... and you guessed it, half the Tiramisu ends up in the bin. So just because you felt sorry for that half pot of mascarpone, you ended up spending more money and wasting more food 😩

Now imagine, there is an app that combines all the lonely, left-over food items in your community (your neighbourhood, your office, your FAC cohort etc) and suggests you a list of recipes composed of those items. All recipes would be tailored to a selected occasion, such as an office lunch, a FAC brunch, a neighbourhood bbq. So next time you'll find a lonely mascarpone looking for its destiny, you won't have to buy any ingredients and you don't get to share the Tiramisu with the bin, but with highly appreciative humans (because chances are that every second person has a bottle of Masala at home bought for the sole purpose of making one Tiramisu)

Who are the stakeholders?
On an individual level, anyone who enjoys food, is conscious about food waste and likes being with people could benefit from this app. On a larger scale, the environment and our limited resources would be affected due to reduced food waste.

What is currently being done to solve this problem?
I'm not aware of any app that does something similar but there are many initiatives and apps to reduce food waste and tackle loneliness, particularly for older people. However, there is still a long way to go and a lot more needs to be done in that area to tackle those issues.