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A selection of bagels is seen at Bullfrog Bagels’ H Street location in Washington, March 28, 2023.
Bullfrog Bagels’ five Washington locations serve up thousands of fresh bagels every day. Customers often clamor for “everything” bagels, so the cinnamon raisin display starts to look a bit neglected. On weekends, the goods usually sell out long before the shops close—but on a slow weekday, even the most popular bagels and sandwiches barely move. In the past, sometimes volunteer groups picked up a day’s worth of leftover bagels to donate to shelters and food pantries. But more often than not, Bullfrog Bagels employees threw them away.
That changed in 2021, when a Danish company launching its food waste mitigation app in the city reached out to Bullfrog Bagels to help them sell their excess food. Instead of staff tossing out the leftovers, customers could buy deeply discounted bagels through an app called Too Good To Go, a secondary marketplace for edible but unsold food.
In 2022, American restaurants and food service businesses threw out nearly 13 million tons of food, according to ReFED, a New York–based food waste research institute. Like the restaurant delivery apps DoorDash or Grubhub, Too Good To Go hosts food businesses selling food for pickup. But instead of ordering menu items, customers purchase surprise bags full of unsold food products. The products in most Bullfrog Bagels bags sell for about $12 when they are on the shelves. Nearly all surprise bags are sold at about a third of their original prices on the app.
The District of Columbia requires commercial food donors like the bagel shops to maintain specific temperatures for hot and cold foods, while frozen food must be frozen solid. The donor must indicate a date by which the food must be eaten, and it cannot be donated more than seven days after preparation.
Operating in 17 countries across Europe, the United States, and Canada, the app has two million daily users and saved 79 million meals in 2022. Saving food also curbs the release of methane, a greenhouse gas. In the U.S., nearly 60 percent of methane emissions from municipal solid-waste landfills stems from rotting food waste.
A 2022 survey of Americans between the ages of 18 and 80 by the International Food Information Council, a consumer research organization, found shifting views on food waste particularly among younger adults, whose views on sustainability and health are powering these changed attitudes. More than half of the respondents were concerned about food waste and noted their top concerns were hunger and wasted money.
There are similar apps for grocery stores that offer discounted close-to-expiration products to customers at large discounts. The surprise-bag model works best for bakeries, cafés, and other shops that have shelf-stable small goods. Restaurant or convenience store offerings on the app are much more hit-or-miss and don’t provide as much quantity or quality compared to baked goods—and for hot prepared food, the app doesn’t attract as many buyers.
For food businesses with large amounts of leftovers, a different type of food rescue service jumps in. The MEANS (Matching Excess and Needs for Stability) Database is one nationwide nonprofit that connects food service businesses with excess food offerings that can go to local emergency food providers like shelters, food pantries, and soup kitchens.
In 2022, American restaurants and food service businesses threw out nearly 13 million tons of food.
While Too Good To Go helps for-profit businesses, the MEANS Database connects farmers, food manufacturers, catering companies, and food service companies that work with corporate offices and schools with emergency food providers across all 50 states. The organization accepts good-faith donations of edible food, a distinction made in the federal Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which gives liability protections to donors of food that is not “readily marketable due to appearance, age, freshness, grade, size, surplus or other conditions,” and the database allows these businesses to post information about available food. Local shelters, neighborhood churches, soup kitchens, and other free food providers automatically get notifications about possible donations.
The organization helps community groups that may not be able to constantly monitor and immediately accept donations and connects those groups with recipients and coordinates delivery at no cost to either party. The MEANS Database, which relies on grants and donations, got its first major funding infusion from the George Washington University’s Business Plan Competition in 2015.
Sammie Paul, the executive director of the MEANS Database, says that preventing costly waste removal is one of the key reasons why food businesses join the database. One business reached out to her recently, worried they had a food product that would go bad in two weeks and that dumping it would cost around $2,000. There are also federal and some state tax incentives for businesses that donate food. However, she notes that many smaller businesses don’t take advantage of these programs because of confusing filing processes. (States are beginning to institute zero-waste laws that require food businesses to donate excesses. California’s donation mandate, for example, goes into effect this year.)
In 2023, the MEANS Database helped recover 38 million pounds of food, an over 1,000 percent increase from last year, when they rescued three million pounds of food. Adding warehouses and manufacturing plants as food donation partners contributed to the hefty increase. Once a group accepts a donation, MEANS often hires drivers to transport the truckloads of food, so emergency food providers can accept donations within minutes, which helps rescue perishable items like frozen foods.
In November, MEANS partnered with southern Arizona’s Borderlands Produce Rescue to save 50 truckloads of watermelon— about 1,050 tons—destined for a landfill in Mexico. The organization distributes fruits and vegetables to Arizonans in need that would have been wasted due to cosmetic flaws or a falloff in consumer demand, and composts anything that is inedible. This type of waste is a major problem in the U.S., says Danielle Vogel, a professor of sustainability and entrepreneurship at American University’s Kogod School of Business.
Vogel explains that food waste begins as soon as crop seeds are sown. “We have artificially deflated the cost of our food by means of our farm subsidies,” she says. “So, when you have folks that aren’t paying the true cost of food, they don’t associate a preciousness with it in the same way.”
Before she transitioned to academia, Vogel founded and owned Glen’s Garden Market in Washington, which was acquired by another local grocer in 2021. “Today’s floppy kale was tomorrow’s vegan kale pesto [and a] bruised tomato was tomorrow’s pizza sauce,” Vogel explains. Even if environmental concerns escape many food business owners, she says, “food waste is just bad for the balance sheet.”
Yet even with an expanding number of businesses moving into the food waste sector, coordination issues persist. In 2019, Center for a Livable Future researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health reported that food businesses often lack the most basic information about how to go about donating their surplus goods, while many food programs that accept donations have limited funds and often rely on volunteers.
The digital divide also continues to hamper food rescue programs. The people who need food may live in communities that do not have reliable internet service, while local community groups sometimes lack the necessary office equipment and the digitally savvy volunteers to make these donations work consistently. Bridging gaps in broadband coverage and confronting the high costs of cellphones and computers will go a long way toward curbing hunger and linking up community members with more reliable food sources.
