25 Food Waste Apps To Help The Environment And Save Money

Food waste is a big problem in our society; as of this article, the world has wasted 1.1 billion tons of food this year.

That is over one-third of all food produced globally going to waste.

Yet people are starving and throwing food away also emits greenhouse gas, adding to our ever-changing climate.

Since most of us have a smartphone in our pockets, it only makes sense to use technology to help reduce food waste with apps.

Depending on your location, some food waste apps work well, and others won’t, so I included the site in every app.

Some apps will minimize the waste in your fridge, while others use creative ways to redistribute food back to the community.

All food waste apps are free to download, with some having the option for in-app purchases.

Enjoy

Apps to cut food waste at home

The following apps are designed to cut food waste and exchange leftover food.

1. Olio

Join the food-sharing revolution

Location: Globally

It’s a way to connect with the people in your area to share the surplus of food and non-food items. Businesses and private people can add items by snapping pictures with the app and making surrounding neighbors aware of the leftover food.

It started as a pilot scheme in North London and is now available worldwide.

• Get free food for yourself or your family

• Declutter your home and cupboards

• Make a positive contribution to your local community

• Meet and make friends with your neighbors

• Prevent food waste and hunger

The Olio Team has the goal to reach 1 billion Olioers in 10 years

Rating: 3.4 out of 5 stars with 5 million downloads

2. ShareWaste

Find a compost in your area and share your food scraps.

Location: Worldwide

The app is designed to connect you with the people in your neighborhood that wish to recycle their kitchen scraps. Now you can divert waste from landfills while getting to know the people around you!

• be a host

• sign up if you have chickens or a worm farm and want more food scraps

• geotag so the donor can easily find you and connect with you

• be a donor

Rating: 10k downloads

3. Too Good To Go

The world’s number 1 app for fighting food waste.

Available in: Denmark, Austria, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, the US, Sweden, Switzerland, The Netherlands, the UK, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Norway, and Ireland, to be expanded

The motto is simple let no food go to waste. Local restaurants have joined in listing their surplus food at discount prices.

It doesn’t stop there. To reduce food waste, Good To Go is teaming up with businesses, schools, households and public affairs to change society positively and create a more sustainable lifestyle for everyone.

Find. Collect. Enjoy – it’s as easy as 1 – 2 – 3

1. Find a store and place your order through the app
2. Collect your meal at the store at the specified time
3. Enjoy your meal a little bit more, knowing you just helped the planet

The company is a certified B corporation and has helped over 68 million people find and save on food.

Ratings: 4.8 stars out of 1.03 million reviews. Over 10 million downloads.

4. Imperfect foods

Location: US Currently, they deliver to most of the West South Central region, Midwest, Northeast and all along the West Coast.

If the food doesn’t look perfect, it isn’t on the supermarket’s shelves. This is why imperfect foods buy food from local farmers and deliver it via a subscription box to your home.

It’s cheaper than your supermarket, and apart from it not being slightly deformed, the fruit and vegetables taste the same, if not better.

They are a nonprofit organization but a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), meaning they are a business with social good at the heart of its mission.

Ratings: 4.1 stars out of 108 with 50k downloads.

5. Flashfood App

Location: US and Canada

Flashfood shows your nearby grocery stores with up to 50% discounts on regular-priced food nearing its best date.

This food waste app lets you buy all the excess food you want directly from your phone. Just go and pick it up.

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 10k reviews and over 1 million downloads

6. Phenix

Location: France, Belgium, Spain and Portugal.

Find merchants, caterers and grocery stores nearby that offer anti-waste baskets made up of their daily surplus that would otherwise go to landfill.

Get great discounted food and help fight climate change by eating.

Reduce food waste by saving unsold food from stores nearby and purchasing it for a small fee to have a nice meal at home.

Rating: 4.5 stars out of 40k reviewed with over 1 million downloads

7. Karma

Slackers will save the world.

Location: UK and Sweden

More than 9000 restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores and cafes have joined to help the fight against food waste.

Tap the food you would like to buy on the app and show up for a discounted takeaway meal, snack or whatever you found uploaded in the app.

Rating: 2.5 out of 7k reviews with 500k downloads.

8. Nosh

Location: UK

This food management app keeps track of your inventory and expiry dates and suggests recipes according to what you have in your fridge or pantry.

Track use by or best before dates and let no food waste.

Rating: 3.4 out of 140 reviews with 10k downloads

9. Food Hero

Location: Canada

FoodHero connects merchants to consumers to quickly sell fresh, surplus food that would otherwise end up in the trash.

By 2025, they aim to reduce food waste by 10% with the help of the FoodHero community.

Rating: 3.2 out of 2.6k reviews with 100k downloads

10. Resq Club

Location: Finnland, Sweden, Estonia, Germany

ResQ helps delicious food that would otherwise go to waste from quality restaurants, cafés, and bakeries near you find a new home.

It even suggests that the business is making an extra income.

Please don’tDon’t throw your food away but sell it at a discounted price.

Their mission is to eliminate food waste in Europe by 2030 in the food and hospitality sector.

Rating: 4.3 out of 12k reviews with 500k downloads

11. 412 Food Rescue

Location: Currently only available in 412 and 724 area codes

This app is mainly about donating the surplus from grocery stores, restaurants, wholesalers, farmer’s markets, etc., to help people with food insecurity.

They do not donate to individuals, only to organizations. You can easily become a volunteer and help people in need. Delivering food in the morning and feeding the hungry in the evening for less food waste.

Rating: No rating with 5k downloads

12. Food for all

Location: Boston and NYC in over 200 Restaurants

Good food shouldn’t go to waste. This is why Food for AllOffering surplus foods at 50% discount and more.

Choose the meal you want to pay for through the app, and pick it up at the restaurant.

Rating: 2.6 out of 674 reviews with 50k downloads.

13. Feed it Forward

Location: Canada and expanding

This app gives you access to free food by showing you a map of available foods, with a pick up time and the amount to get.

Founded by Canadian chef Jagger Sean Gordon, this food waste app is a not-for-profit organization on a mission to feed people globally that want to be food responsible and help those with food insecurities.

Rating: 3.2 out of 9 reviews and 500 downloads

14. Spoiler alert

Only IOS

This app is designed to make product labeling and tracking easy for the whole team.

Spoiler Alert is a mobile application designed to change how the food service industry labels, tracks, and monitors the age of food products from fresh to finished.

Easy to scan, track your waste, and keep your team accountable.

15. Second Harvest

Location: Canada

Another way to donate surplus foods is to bring them to social service organizations rather than landfills.

Donating food from snacks for children’s after-school programs, meals for seniors, food for shelters and drop-in centers, and more.

Rating: 4 stars out of 9 reviews with 1k downloads.

16. F4A – Reduce Food Waste

Location: Luxembourg and soon their product will also be available on the French market. 

Food waste is a global issue, and the best food waste apps tackle this by connecting with local supermarkets to sell their soon-to-expire food at discounted prices.

This is a more eco-friendly process since the food doesn’t rot in a landfill, creating methane and CO2.

On top of that, you are saving some money and the environment.

Rating: 10k downloads; no ratings yet.

17. Goodr

Location: United States

Goodr was founded in 2017 with a vision to build a strong community of companies and nonprofit organizations working together to end world hunger.    

They are addressing more than just feeding people.

1. Redirecting your food waste to people in need

2. Composting properly and avoiding landfills

3. Holistic waste management

Rating: 1k downloads so far

Food Tracker Apps for a sustainable kitchen

18. Seafoodwatch

It’s easier than ever to get the latest recommendations for seafood and sushi, learn more about the seafood you eat, and locate or share businesses that serve sustainable seafood.

Would you like to eat seafood but are unsure whether it is sustainable? This app will let you know. Find restaurants near you that serve ocean-friendly seafood.

• Get up-to-date seafood recommendations and how it has been fished.

• Installs to your device’s SD card

• Get free, up-to-date seafood recommendations

• Search for seafood quickly and easily by common market name

• Search for sushi by Japanese name as well as the shared market name

• Locate restaurants and stores that serve ocean-friendly seafood

• Access in-depth conservation notes

Although I am vegan now, I used to love fish, so it only made sense to involve this app here.

Rating: 3 out of 5

19. Fridgely

Food Expiration Date Tracker

The average family wastes %25 of food per year, that’s $1400. This app is designed to let you know when your food expires. Quickly find recipes for the food you already have in your fridge, and create a shopping list of the food you finished using.

• Stop wasting food

• Share your food

• sync between devices

• organize your food

• quickly find recipes

• scan barcode

Rating: 4 out of 5

only available on iPhone

20. Best Before Food Tracker

Manage Your Food

Manage your food with Best Before – Food Tracker.
Add products, consume them or throw them away—different categories and locations to classify products.
The track opened products and those close to the expiry date, and you will remember what is stored in the fridge.
Save money, and no more food waste!

• Add products, consume them or throw them away

•  Easy to add products with auto-completion.

• Add images to products by taking pictures or choosing an image from your gallery.

• The app remembers products that you’ve previously entered.

• A lot of product suggestions.

• Product management by category and storage location

• Customization of categories, places, and units.

• Notifications to remind you to eat products before the expiry date or after opening.

Rating: 4.4 out of 5 with 50k downloads

21. BEEP – Expiry Date Tracking

You can use Beep at home, pharmacies, supermarkets, or any other product with a barcode and an expiration date.

Make it easy to categorize your products and share them with your team. Know when your food is about to expire and let nothing go to waste.

Rating: not accurate with over 100k downloads

22. NoWaste

Easily track, organize and manage the food in your home. Like fridgely, this app is designed to prevent food waste by informing you about what you have in the fridge or pantry.

Create a shopping list, reduce food waste and save money. Stay accountable and track your food waste with the in-app calculator.

Rating: 3.0 stars out of 113 reviews. 10k downloads

These are not apps but they are worth mentioning:

23. Misfits market

Misfits market is similar to imperfect food, offering up to 40% discounted food from grocery stores and farmers.

Subscriptions are available for both services, which package your ugly produce and mail it directly to you. In both cases, you save money on your grocery shopping.

Misfits’ fruit and vegetables are organic, while imperfect foods sell conventional produce. If you want a more in-depth comparison, I found this article.

Your subscription box gets sent straight to your home, and the consumers can cancel anytime.

Location: Both are limited to the United States and available in all states.

24. Raeri formerly Transfernation

This company doesn’t just stop by supplying surplus food.

• Furniture 

• Clothes & shoes

• Books, magazines. 

• Art supplies, desk supplies, stationery 

• Kitchenware (pots, pans, plates, etc.) 

The idea is that whenever you want to get rid of stuff Raeri can come and collect it and find a new use for it. They will match the unwanted items with a program, marketplace or institution to upcycle them.

Genius.

25. Hungry Harvest

Location: We currently offer produce and grocery delivery throughout Maryland, Washington, DC, Greater Philadelphia, Southern New Jersey, Northern Delaware, South Florida, The Triangle Area & Charlotte in North Carolina & the Detroit Metro Area.

Hunrgy harvest is selling ugly produce to Americans in need.

Final thoughts

Since these food waste apps are all location based you may have to try out a few different ones before you find one that works best in your area.

The goal is to reduce the global food waste problem and find better logistic ways to bring food to people in need and not to landfills.

I believe there isn’t a food shortage out in the world, I think it is a logistics problem. Personally eating an apple that is considered ugly or deformed doesn’t bother me.

But what about you is it important for you to have perfectly shaped fruit or would you eat the ugly ones too?

Another simple step most of us can do with easy is composting. If you are new to composting you can check out the ultimate guide to composting here.