Guelph businesses take up app aimed at reducing food waste, cutting costs for customers

An app that has made a splash in theglobal movement to end food waste has become popular among businesses inGuelph, Ont., and will soon be expanding to the Waterloo region.

So far, more than 25 Guelph businesses have partnered with the Too Good To Go app. Theplatform connects restaurants and cafes that have surplus food with customers who buy "surprise bags" filled with food valued between $18 and $24.The consumer pays a third of the retail value.

Most are available closer to the end of the business' operating hours but occasionally businesses offer the bags in the morning as well.

"We do our best to categorize the surplus food into baked goods or prepared meals, and users come and pick that up.So every day is a little bit different," explainsSam Kashani, Canadian manager for Too Good To Go.

The company launched in Denmark in 2016 and Kashani says since entering the Canadian market in July 2021, the company has diverted over 600,000 mealsfrom going in the trash.

"If you think of just that quantity ...the amount of surplus food [saved] is quite a bit."

Alexis Imola, owner ofIvory Fern Foods in Guelph,says food waste is a big pet peeve of hersso she does her best to keep surplus food to a minimum.

Imola said she still joinedToo Good To Go because every little bit helps.

"I don't have a lot of food wastebut even the waste we do have, like at the end of the week, it's kind of just going in the garbage.So why not let someone else be able to pick it up? Because there's nothing wrong with it," she said.

Imola says thesurprise bags she creates usually contain a bigger portion size of some of the bowls offered onthe menu.

Over atDeBar Dessert Cafe, also in Guelph, owner Rick Green says he actually doesn't have a lot of food waste by end of day, butwhen he was approached by Kashani to join the movement, he jumped at the idea.

"There's a lot of people just around the corner that live in government assisted buildings that maybe can't afford groceries," he said."So this app is really good."

Green says on average, DeBar offers twosurprise bags a day but on weekends that might grow to four or five.

Food waste in Canada

According to a 2022 study conducted by the National Zero Waste Council in partnership with the Love Food Hate Waste campaign,63 per centof the food Canadians throw away could have been eaten.

For the average Canadian household that amounts to 140 kilograms of wasted food per year at a cost of more than $1,300 per year.

Nationally, that works out to more than 2 million tonnes of edible food wasted each year. which works out to be more than $20 billion.

Mike Von Massow,a food economist at the University of Guelph, says that apps like Too Good To Go are great at diverting food to people who will eat it but "is it a magic bullet that's going to make restaurant food waste go away? No."

Von Massow says that's because there are a number of different types of food waste in restaurants, not all of which will be suitable for food rescue like food spoilage,unused food that isn't aesthetically pleasing, or production waste.

"We're not going to come up with one thing that makes a difference" he said, adding he'sseeing positive signs from restaurants recently when it comes to food waste.

"I think restaurants are paying more attention to what they throw out and what they do. So my guess is that the food waste at restaurants is also going down."

According to Too Good To Go, in oneyear the companyhas saved Canadians more than $7 million by rescuingfood that would have otherwise gone to waste.