Toronto startup lets you buy food for half the price

Every day, Toronto restaurants and grocery stores throw out a whole lot of food. You can see the city's ubiquitous yellow garbage bags pile up in front of local eateries and can often find dumpsters filled with fresh produce and other high-quality goods. But one app wants to end these wasteful, yet often unavoidable practices.

"The big issue with food waste, just across the board, is logistics. Who's going to pick up the food? Who's going to drop off the food?" explains Josh Domingues, the founder of a new, locally based app called Flashfood. "What Flashfood does is negates the logistical issues with that process."

Instead of discarding perfectly good food, restaurants and retailers can soon sell it directly to consumers - at a discounted price - through this burgeoning startup.

It's really a win-win-win scenario: consumers get to buy cheap food, businesses get to make money off food they'd normally throw out and Flashfood takes a cut from each transaction.

The Flashfood app, which will launch in Toronto some time in late August or early September, will let users make purchases directly through their phones. Anyone will be able to set up a profile and browse through the various deals available at participating stores and restaurants.

So far, 15 eateries, including King Slice and Alex Rei dos Leitoes, have signed up. Domingues also says a major grocery chain is on board - he won't reveal any more details about this but promises it's "one of the big three."

Along with connecting consumers with restaurants and retailers, Flashfood will also let users know how much food they're diverting away from landfills based on how much money they spend through the app.

Domingues hopes to expand across Canada, and later, around the world.

Photo via Flashfood

by Amy Grief via blogTO