How to reduce food waste: the food-sharing apps offering cheap leftover meals for eco-conscious eaters

Karma and Too Good To Go are food-sharing apps that work with cafes and restaurants to offer leftover food to customers for discount prices

Olio enables its customers to give their own unused food items free to other users, via collection from their homes

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A Karma app user collecting his food, ordered through the food-sharing app, from a Coco Di Mama food outlet in London. Photo: AFP

Published: 3:00pm, 13 Feb 2020Updated: 10:17pm, 13 Feb 2020

Jack Convery pops into a London branch of Italian eatery Coco di Mama to grab a cut-price lunch ordered on his smartphone’s food-sharing app Karma.

The 27-year-old Amazon employee – with an eye for a bargain and for helping the environment – uses a mobile phone app that sells surplus food from hundreds of British restaurants at discounted prices.

“Anything I can do to help the environment and look after the budget as well is beneficial, so yeah, it’s a win-win,” Convery says.

“It ends up working out much cheaper than to go to [British supermarket] Tesco and buy a meal for one,” he adds, noting that he can usually source his daily dinner for about £3.50 (US$4.50) via the app.

A Karma user browsing for available food. Photo: AFP

Decomposing food waste is a key source of greenhouse gases – and a staggering one-third of all food is thrown away, according to industry estimates.

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