WASHINGTON — Across the United States, about 80 billion pounds of food is thrown out every year. That’s nearly 40% of the U.S. food supply. A new app is hoping to curb that number in the District to help residents get perfectly good food – for a discount - that would otherwise have been tossed out.
Food waste across the world is at an all-time high.
“We realized that today, one-third of the food we produce ends up in the trash. So, it's completely insane to think that we throw away that much food,” Lucie Bash, Co-Founder of the app Too Good to Go, said.
Basch used to work in the food processing industry. This is where she saw firsthand how much food was being wasted.
“We wanted to find a solution for everyone to fight food waste on a daily basis. So what we created an app that you can download for free, and you would see all the stores around you that might have leftovers at the end of the day, and you can pay a small fee on the app to come and pick up all that food that would have been thrown away at the end of the day,” Basch said.
The app has more than 400,000 consumers and 1,000 active partners. But, in order to make real change – more restaurants must get on board. Some in D.C. are starting to do just that.
“So, it's really building, that 'win-win' solution towards having a simple solution to not throw away food anymore. And when [we] as consumers, we can do something really concrete to fight food waste, and so helping the planet, while getting some great products for dinner every night,” Basch said.
The app is simple. You download it to your phone, search your area, and it will show participating restaurants and stores. You can order what you want, and you save food from being wasted and some money on a meal.
“Every day we save more than 150,000 meals from the trash. So together we saved more than 60 million meals from the trash from the beginning, from day one. And it's really been hyper-growing, everything we've seen was too good to go. It's now more than 60,000 partners across 15 countries, and in the U.S., it's been so successful, and even faster than any launch we've seen in Europe before,” Basch added.
In our area, the app is only available to stores and restaurants in D.C., but Basch said they’re looking to expand in Virginia and Maryland very soon.