The problem

Nobody loves when perfectly eatable food gets thrown out – yet almost every business which deals with food does that every day. Obviously, this nagging feeling may cover an array of different stances towards what the core problem is: The pure waste of food, the lack of distribution to people who cannot afford food, over-production, negative effects on the climate, inequality, luxury, carelessness of others, superabundance, … or capitalism? For certain, the full scope of throwing out food is a structural problem that needs to be fixed. Thinking about problem selection, the mere process of selecting what the actual problem is seem extremely hard, if not insurmountable, and requires years of research. Besides, one technical solution may not fix all the causes. So which cause is most important, which is easiest, which is the most effective to solve – they may not be the same. Is it possible – or good? – to fix a symptom of a larger structure and thereby try to at least diminish the effects of it? Could symptom fixing be a way to core structural change?

One solution among many causes

In 2015, some Danes from Copenhagen thought food waste was problematic, and decided to fix it in a way that works with the market forces as a lever of change. They diagnose the problem as having two centers: i) food waste leads to negative effects on the climate due to overproduction and ii) wasted food benefits the bins instead of those in need due to a lack of distribution. The project sought to fix distribution as well as overproduction at the same time. The project is informed by the literature on food waste, thus citing ’food waste’-expert Tristram Stuart, who states that one third of the world’s food is wasted (i.e. 1,3 billion tons every year – enough to feed 3 billion people/10 times the population of the US). So, what did they do?

They made an app called ’Too Good to Go’. The idea is to, in their own words, give ”stores a platform to sell their surplus food” for significantly lower prices. So far, this works surprisingly well. In less than two years, they have 5,000 stores and 3 million people signed up that in sum have ”rescued”, as they call it, 2,5 million meals. What the app did was to offer free visibility to (new) customers and thus increasing revenue of stores. Using a profit-based approach, the app incentivizes stores to sell instead wasting their food just before closing time, and thus utilize the market force as a lever for social change. The app charges a certain percentage of the transactions thus making a profit themselves allowing them to expand their capacities.

The vision of the project is to equal production with consumption, thus stopping a culture of overproduction. However, the project does not avoid overconsumption, and overconsumption may lead to producing more food (a sort of de facto form of overproduction). The app may simply just expand stores’ customer base thus lead to ’fake waste’ being produced that again may lead to producing more goods and thus produce more waste. But this problem is unverified. Another speculative but potentially positive side effect of this project is that it may lead to an increased awareness of food waste thus changing norms on a large scale. As such, food waste awareness may spill-over to other domains rather than being siloed in a business model for stores. Another negative approach to this project is a question: How many poor people do actually benefit from this? The project simply provides a platform for distribution, but does not offer social redistribution from the well-off to other sectors of society. So it seems that the project only focuses on solving one of their two diagnosed problems.