The Five Best Apps to Reduce Food Waste (and Save Money on Groceries)

Grocery prices just keep rising—they’re up more than 2% in the last year, and the trend line doesn’t seem likely to bend downward any time soon. The average monthly spend on groceries is about $504 (that’s more than $6,000 a year), which is a lot for most people. At the same time, the average family in this country loses about $1,500 every year in food waste—about one-third of all the food in this country goes uneaten.

Those are bleak numbers when people are struggling to afford groceries, but there are steps you can take to reduce both the amount of food wasted in this country and your grocery bills. One of the easiest is to download an app that bridges those two problems by making discounted, leftover groceries easily available. Here are some of the best ones to use.

Too Good To Go

Perhaps the best-known of the “food rescue” apps, Too Good To Go recruits local restaurants and grocery stores, which then list food that would otherwise be thrown away at steeply discounted prices. Consumers can hop on the app and claim the offerings, swing by to make their purchase, and enjoy their food.

One slight downside to this system is a heavy focus on “surprise bags,” which are food items you buy sight unseen. This can work well if you’re just looking to score a cheap meal from a specific restaurant, but when it comes to groceries, not knowing what you’re getting can be a problem. But if you’re hyper-focused on saving money and saving food from landfills, the app definitely works as advertised.

Currently Too Good To Go operates in a lot of major metropolitan areas in the U.S., but you’ll have to check to see if it’s in your local area.

Misfits Market

If you’re looking for a way to reduce waste by scoring cheap food and get it delivered, Misfits Market is a great option. It’s a weird quirk of grocery stores that unusual-looking food—discolored, misshapen, or scarred in some way—is tough to sell. Folks just prefer food that looks nice. A lot of “imperfect” food (especially produce) gets tossed aside as unsellable, so Misfits Market (which recently purchased competing ugly food app Imperfect Foods) collects those gnarly-looking items, boxes them up, and delivers them to its users. It claims you can save 30 to 40% on this “ugly” food over what you’ll find in the grocery store. Keep in mind there’s a minimum order of $15 and a $5.99 delivery fee.

Flashfood

Flashfood works with local grocery stores to alert consumers to items that are about to hit their expiration dates and be removed from the shelves, and it offers a deep price cut (as much as 50% off) on those items. This spares that perfectly good food from being thrown into a dumpster and saves you a lot of money at the same time. There are no “surprise bags” here—you buy the items through the app, then just stop by the store to pick them up.

As with other apps on this list, you’ll need to check if Flashfood has partnered with stores in your area that are within your range.

Olio

Olio is a good alternative app for reducing food waste and saving money because it focuses not on grocery stores or restaurants, but your neighbors. Folks who have leftovers (or other household items) they’re going to throw away can list the stuff on Olio. People seeking free food can claim it via the app, then stop by and pick it up. Some of these giveaways are marked “no contact” and left outside for pickup, so you don’t have to worry about interacting with people. Olio also partners with local stores, assigning a volunteer to collect unwanted food from restaurants and cafes and list it on the app as well.

Olio’s usefulness for you will depend entirely on how robust its network is in your area, of course. If no one’s giving away food, you won’t get much benefit from it. And there’s no guarantee its listings won’t be low-value stuff like half-used condiments or expired food people are just trying to get rid of. But it’s worth checking regularly to score some really great deals and help spare more food from the garbage.

Hungry Harvest

Focused on produce (though it does offer some other items), Hungry Harvest will deliver “rescued” food to your door if you live in one of its service areas. Like Misfits Market, Hungry Harvest specializes in produce that would otherwise be thrown into a dumpster. This is a subscription service, so you sign up for a weekly box of food at a fixed price. There’s a minimum order threshold of $29.99 to get free delivery (otherwise delivery costs $3.49 per order).

The app offers several sizes of box: Mini, Full, and Super (with optional organic-only versions), and each category has a minimum order amount that has to be reached with produce before you can add in anything else. For example, a Mini Harvest box has a minimum order of $17, and that has to be met with fruits and veggies only. Once you hit that $17, you can start adding on snack foods or other items that might be available. The main purpose of the app is to rescue that produce, after all. The good news is that the produce will be anywhere from 25% to 50% cheaper than what you’ll find at the grocery store.