Phone apps set to help fight food waste: Andrew Coppolino

Human beings waste a lot food.

According to the United Nations, one-third of all food produced for us to eat gets tossed in the garbage. That amounts to over 1 billion tonnes of waste each year.

In Canada, the consulting group Value Chain International (VCI) estimates that Canadians throw away $31 billion dollars worth of food annually – a figure that is more than the combined gross domestic products of 29 of the world's poorest countries. 

• A $31B problem: How Canada sucks at reducing food waste

According to 2014 statistics from VCI, roughly nine percent of that waste is generated by the restaurant and hotel industry. Those numbers have spurred the development of smartphone technology in Great Britain, Germany, Denmark, the United States and Canada designed to reduce the waste. Some of the apps even track the amount of carbon emissions that have been reduced as well.

Here's how they work:

• Users download an app on their smartphone.
• Restaurants send out a notification to the app users saying what kind of food is available and when.
• Users select the dishes they want, pay for the food on their phone, and go to restaurant to pick up the meal.
• Customers get a discount on a take-away meal while restaurants generate more sales and throw away less food. The app company usually takes a percentage of the sales transaction.    

'I just threw out $4,000 worth of food'

The new Ubifood app in Montreal allows users to scan restaurants for meal discounts on their phone and place an order. 

Flashfood in Toronto, which launched in beta earlier this year, is a similar design that connects restaurants with customers via smartphone and allows vendors to sell food that remains after lunch or dinner service. These are not leftovers from a previous diner, it should be stressed: they are meals just like you would order for take-out. 

Josh Domingues is the founder and CEO of Flashfood. He was motivated to take action after hearing from his sister, who is a chef. 

"I was working on Bay Street in finance, and my sister gave me a call. She was at a catering event and she said, 'I just threw out $4,000 worth of food,'" said Domingues.

Originally, Domingues, 27, was planning to create an app that pairs farmers and chefs, but after doing more research, he says he was shocked at the amount of food that we throw away. He talked to over 100 grocery stores and restaurants to find out how much food was getting thrown out and when.

"I thought if I wanted to see a deal for chicken breast and instead of having to go into the store to find it, what if I got notified for that deal and I could pay for it through my phone and go pick it up?" he said. Flashfood.com was born.

Restaurants, grocery chain on board

Currently, Domingues says there are about 30 Toronto restaurants on board, and they ran a pilot programme two weeks ago in London, Ont., with the grocery chain Farm Boy. He says he expects the relationship will expand to the Farm Boy locations in Kitchener and Cambridge.  

Domingues wants to address the fact that buried under tonnes of garbage in landfill sites, food rots anaerobically and creates immense amounts of methane gas, one of the worst greenhouse gases, because it absorbs the heat of the sun more effectively than carbon dioxide and warms the atmosphere. 

"If international food waste were a country, it would be the third leading producer of greenhouse gas emissions behind the U.S. and China," he said.  

As for all entrepreneurs, the goal is to make money, but Domingues says these apps are a necessary service for restaurants, grocers and the entire planet, and he says he wanted to contribute to a solution. "What we're doing with food waste is an epidemic on a global scale and not sustainable."

More food columns from CBC Kitchener-Waterloo's contributor Andrew Coppolino