Entrepreneurs Jamie Crummie and Chris Wilson have designed an app to offload bakery products that are destined for the bin at a discounted price.

‘Too Good to Go’ aims to reduce the issue of food waste in the food sector by ordering a product from a bakery and then collecting the food in a designated time window.

Crummie, who is funding the project with his university grant, told British Baker: “[In the UK] we’re Europe’s largest offender of food waste and throwing away 600,000 tonnes of edible food a year. That’s coupled with the fact that 1 million people in the UK last year alone were on emergency food parcels from foodbanks, which is something that doesn’t need to happen or exist. Our aim is to redistribute food and ensure that perfectly good edible food is ending up in bellies and not bins.”

When asked whether the app could solve the food waste issue in bakeries, Jamie felt it could be used as a ‘safety net’ to allow bakeries that produce baking products to ensure it is actually for human consumption, rather than waste.

“It is very much about changing human behaviour and perceptions towards food waste, which I think in the past has been negative. This app is a way to change that. It will demonstrate that food that has gone past its best-by date or food that might not be fresh that day is still perfectly good to eat, and still of the same quality that bread, for example, was the day it was baked. In terms of bakery, it does have massive scope to allow bakeries to continue their love of making food without having that awful feeling at the end of the day when they have to throw away umpteen numbers of loaves of bread and pastries.”

The discounted meals from food waste will cost the buyer between £2 and £3.80 – part of which will back to companies involved in the project. The app has so far been launched in Brighton, London, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester, but the entrepreneurs are hoping it will not be constrained to just larger UK cities.

“We want to expand to communities all around the UK, so that as a society we can really get to grips and get involved with this war on food waste and start changing attitudes towards it.”

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