Foodprint: Cheap Meals, Less Waste

In New Zealand, cafes, restaurants and supermarkets produce 50,000 tonnes of food waste. Over 60% of this is completely avoidable. Michal Garvey is a big believer that, “Food that is grown for people should end up in people and not used for compost or fed to pigs or thrown in landfill”. This is why, she started Foodprint.

Foodprint is a food-tech startup that addresses the food wastage problem while providing win-win solutions for both eateries and consumers. Eateries list the products that they have a surplus of and make them available to users of the app at a discount. On the other side, customers can prepay and order their discounted meal and collect it from the café before they close.

Eateries benefit by having access to a database of new customers and a platform where they can minimise their food waste (and all the painful logistics associated with it) while recuperating some of their food cost. Customers benefit by discovering new eateries where they can buy tasty meals for a fraction of the price while playing an active role in tackling our society’s food waste problem.

On this episode we talk about:

Having too much food and not enough customers at the end of the day, a real problem
The logistical problems of food waste – donating it v/s throwing it away
How Foodprint has evolved during lockdowns to help their eateries
Food tech in NZ – a growing sector?
Starting and scaling a food tech business, what it takes

Listen to the Podcast Here:

Quotes from the episode:

“My simplistic 16-year old thought why are we growing these crops to feed animals which we then eat when we could instead eat the crops myself.”

“Many eateries are quite good at using their sales data to predict how much food they should make. At the same time, there are so many variables that you never know what is going to actually happen. Eateries want to strike a balance between making sure you sell out and still having options for your last few customers of the day. That’s where Foodprint steps in.”