Up to Half of World’s Food Goes to Waste

Smartphones and full pantries

Such variation among countries calls for tailor-made solutions. Woolley’s answer to food waste? There’s an app for that. He built the “Pantry App” to help users track their groceries, which he said cut food waste by 34 percent.

The results were based on a very limited experiment, monitoring food over the course of one week. The app would inform people of how many groceries they bought, when they expired, and how to combine remaining ingredients through recipe tips.

But one person who attended the presentation said more should be done to prevent shoppers from buying so much food to begin with. Jeremy Bonvoisin, a postdoctoral candidate at the Technical University of Berlin, said customers are willing to squander food because they value it so little.

“The problem is that the inventory is becoming too big because the value of food is getting cheaper,” he said.

Bonvoisin said the Pantry App might help those who already want to make a change, though it could also encourage them to waste more because they no longer have to pay attention to how much food they buy. They outsource that to the app.

“I think at some point it may have some perverse effects,” he said.

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