A customer receives a bag of food through the Too Good to Go app in Los Angeles. — Too Good to Go/Handout via Thomson Reuters FoundationSince Susan Teaford began searching out cheap food – chasing discounts as end-dates near – the US retiree has slashed her grocery bills and made a virtue out of bargain hunting.
“I hate food waste and love a good bargain,” Teaford, 66, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, as she baked a rack of ribs snagged at half price through the Flashfood app. Inflation rose at its fastest rate since the 1970s in the United States last year to hit 8%, while Russia’s war in Ukraine and supply chain problems have driven up food and energy prices.
Since then, the company says it has diverted more than 50 million pounds of food from landfills and saved shoppers more than US$130mil . This has created a “flywheel effect”, with investments of US$500mil in 2019 blooming to US$2bil last year, she said. “Retailers didn’t really have a solution” to food waste, said Lucie Basch, co-founder of the Copenhagen-based app which was launched in 2016.