The Back of the Fridge
The idea
A simple online system for offering food and drink items that you’re not going to manage to use before their best before date to your friends or neighbours.
It would have to be based on trusted relationships to avoid any feeling of risk that the food was contaminated or had been badly stored.
It should also be able to remind you when food was going to go out of date if you added products when you bought them.
It should be a non-monetary system but could record the environmental savings you’ve made by cutting down on waste.
What social need does it address?
It’s estimated that 25% of food bought is wasted because it goes beyond its best before date or is simply thrown away because it is unwanted. This has a massive environmental impact both because of the raw materials wasted but also because it means more movement of goods and hence emissions.
What’s new about it?
No service exists to make this easy to do alongside the demands of modern life.
What inspired you?
The discovery on an unopened bag of moldy carrots in the vegetable draw.
In my experience stuff gets old in the fridge because people forget about it, they don’t explore their fridges very often, and they keep stuff out of plain sight, in bags or obscured.
This would have to work on a very local level, and it would need SMS alerts because emails wouldn’t be fast enough. The waste of food is criminal, but how many people, while they are cooking, are going to rush to their computers to save a bag of carrots?