Vittles is Joining the Fight Against Food Waste
Help fight against food waste by ordering leftover food at restaurants for a significantly lower price
Out of the 4 million tons of waste New York City sends to landfill every year, one third of it is food waste. That’s 1,333,333 tons of food being wasted. And while some of that 1.3 million tons is Artichoke Pizza, and therefore doesn’t count as “waste”, that number is still sobering.
According to NYC.gov, restaurants account for the largest single stream of food waste commercially. Everyone knows that restaurants toss a lot of food at the end of each day. Much of this food isn’t bad — it just can’t be sold by the time the restaurant reopens. We like our food fresh, so restaurants can’t be blamed here.
So how do we fight food waste?
Introducing Vittles Leftovers
For things to change, we need two things: a better incentive and a viable solution. We created Vittles Leftovers to allow local restaurants to sell what would otherwise be wasted food to customers for reduced prices. When you view a restaurant’s menu in the app, you’ll be able to see if that restaurant has leftovers available.
A better incentive: There are other apps that allow restaurants to sell leftover/surplus food, but they charge the restaurant a massive fee on each transaction. This leaves the restaurant with only the good feels of having not wasted the food. A popular app, Too Good To Go, charges restaurants a yearly subscription as well as a per-order fee of $1.79. While this is better than nothing, our motto at Vittles is that we can always do better than “better than nothing”.
Vittles lets restaurants sell leftovers for absolutely free, meaning they can actually make meaningful profit from doing their part in food waste reduction!
A viable solution: Leftovers are sold by restaurants in the form of “surprise bags”. While we can’t guarantee specific menu items (restaurants don’t know in advance what will be left over), we can guarantee that it will be perfectly good food sold at a great price!
As a gentle reminder: Vittles is the best food rewards app ever created. You can use Vittles to place orders for fresh orders at any time of the day like you would with Grubhub or DoorDash — and you’ll earn points for doing so. You can use any points you earn on Vittles for placing Leftovers orders for even better deals on surplus food! That’s right! It’s food waste reduction meets rewards!
We believe this is the model of ordering food that makes the most sense. Fresh food should cost more and food that isn’t as fresh but still edible should cost less. If it’s something that was going to be thrown out, why not sell it for a deal?
Ready to help fight food waste? Download Vittles for Android or iOS, or visit our website to learn more. Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram!
Own a local restaurant? Partner with Vittles to get amazing features, unbeatable pricing, and benefit your local scene like never before!
