The Problem: £23 billion of food is wasted each year in the UK alone.
The Solution: Add a nutrition section to a fitness app that flags up when food is going off and gives you a recipe to use it.
Not only are billions of pounds of food wasted each year, if food waste was a country it would be the third biggest carbon producer, after the USA and China. So it’s a pretty big problem.
Unfortunately, most people don’t really care about food waste, so banging on about the problem won’t achieve change.
I therefore propose coming at it from a different angle, by focusing on nutrition. The fad for fitness at the moment is huge, with apps tracking just about everything people do, from steps to heartbeats, so why not track food?
I suggest creating an add-on to fitness apps which enables users to scan their shopping to determine if they are getting all the nutrients they need. In real-time the app would flag up any ‘no-no’ items (e.g. high sugar) and would also suggest nutritious additions as the person shopped.
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That would be great for fitness nuts as they could easily work out what they need to eat, linked directly with the exercise they did (i.e. amount of protein and carbs set against workouts, and someone could even choose to buy a no-no food in exchange for spending fitness points they’d built up in the app, enabling them to have regulated treats).
The benefit for food waste is that the app would know when every item was going off, so could flag up the need to eat items on particular days. A user would select what they were eating at meals using voice to keep it quick and simple, and the app would then tick those foods of the list. Then if there was some yoghurt and chicken soon to go off, for example, it would flag that up and suggest a recipe to use it.
The point is to find something people are passionate about and leverage it to achieve a sustainability goal.
The app could be further developed for those on diets, monitoring what was eaten each week to help keep people on track, and giving hints on how to save money as well as calories as people shopped. And also for parents, helping to ensure they are getting the best possible food for their kids.
It could even be used to push people towards a more plant-based diet, flagging up alternatives to meat and dairy by showcasing the benefits to the individual app user, based on what that app user cares most about.
It could even be monetised through advertising, with companies able to give real-time vouchers to consumers to tempt them to try out their products.
And for shops and supermarkets, it’s a great way to get enhanced adoption of scan and spend technology – at the moment this is pretty awful, except in the biggest supermarket where you can borrow a scanner. The app would help drive much wider adoption by offering people something of real value – it could even include a list feature that flags up when you go through a section and forget an item!
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