£2 meals at end of night are ‘too good’ to waste New app aims to stop city restaurants dumping left-overs
ANEW mobile phone app with which people can buy restaurant meals for as little as £2 could slash the amount of perfectly good food dumped in bins every night.
The Too Good to Go App has been created to stop Birmingham restaurants throwing out left-over food and offer it instead to hungry customers at a bargain price.
Customers can order meals such as burritos, chicken katsu and paellas mid-afternoon or late evening for as little as two or three pounds when it would otherwise be thrown away.
Chris Wilson and Jamie Crummie are the brains behind the app which could go a small way to cutting the gigantic mountain of food dumped each year.
App users are asked to select from a list of nearby restaurants, order and collect the meal in eco-friendly takeaway boxes.
It launched in Birmingham last month but is also available in Brighton, Leeds, Manchester and most recently in the capital, where 96 restaurants have signed up.
About 5,600 tonnes of food waste is produced a year by city restaurants, according to Birmingham Food Council, while UK restaurants, pubs and bars dispose of 600,000 tonnes of food a year.
This is as 103,000 emergency food supplies were issued to people who could not afford to eat in the West Midlands last year.
Chris Wilson, co-founder of the app, said: “We are offering a means of proving that much of what we waste as a society is not actually waste at all, but actually perfectly edible food that we should be appreciating as our most valuable energy resource and not taking for granted as something to just throw in the bin. Our immediate hopes are to roll the app out nationwide and add to our number of participating restaurants, cafes and bakeries in Birmingham as we look to save as much food as possible from being sent to landfill.”
Restaurants already signed up to the scheme include Jimmy Spices in Broad Street, Shahi Masala in Ward End, and Johnny Spice in Wolverhampton.
Kam Chohan, director at Jimmy Spices Birmingham, said: “As a buffet restaurant we have to display large quantities of food at all times.
“Unfortunately this leads to huge wastage on a daily basis. We estimate at least 30kg of food wastage daily.
“And rather than putting all this food in the bin, we would like to see it consumed.
“Joining Too Good To Go will reduce the wastage and give their customers great food at fraction of its original cost.”