grocery shopping – The Concordian

An increasing number of grocers have taken to offering online ordering services.

The consumer can add food items to their cart, and either pick it up in store or have it delivered at a cost. But what if you could do this and contribute to eliminating waste at the same time?

Montreal-based startup FoodHero offers a virtual market, allowing merchants to sell food that would have otherwise ended up in the garbage – products that are still consumable. But FoodHero is not a food company.

“We are actually a technology company,” said Alexandria Laflamme, a FoodHero representative. “We developed an application with the primary goal to counter food waste.”

It is no secret that many food merchants dispose of food items that are still good. As per Second Harvest’s 2019 The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste report, nearly 60 per cent of food produced in Canada is wasted annually. In fact, Canada is among the top emitters where food waste is concerned. According to the Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition’s (BCFN) 2018 Food Sustainability Index, Canada ranks fifth for overall food loss and waste.

“Our interface gives the consumer a chance to go give a second life to these products,” said Laflamme, adding that the products are offered at 25 to 60 per cent off their original price. Customers can search for products by store proximity and filter through food categories, allowing for them to shop accordingly to their diet, whether it be vegetarian, lactose-free, Halal or Kosher.

“Consumers are always thinking ‘oh, I don’t know what I can do,’ but FoodHero gives them the power to do something,” said Laflamme. “We act as an intermediary agent between the consumer and the merchant, and use technology to give them power.” She added that this technological aspect allows for their collaborators to still feel as though they are in charge and contributing to the issue at hand.

Being primarily a tech company, FoodHero worked on an algorithm within the application that allows the consumer to see the amount of emissions that were prevented through their cumulative orders and the kilograms of food waste saved. “The consumer can actually see their impact,” explained Laflamme. “This allows for them to make sense of what they are doing.”

FoodHero’s primary mission is to reduce food waste in grocery stores, which is currently at around 40 per cent worldwide, according to Laflamme and statistics found on the FoodHero website.

“Our goal is to work with many agents in the food industry,” said Laflamme, referring to producers and distributors. “Currently, we work only with grocery stores, which, in itself, is already a place where there is a huge amount of waste.”

“We are starting off. The statistics are still being accumulated but we are growing,” said Laflamme. “We started off collaborating with one IGA, three months ago, then six, and currently, we have over 100 IGA stores on board and are approaching the 200 mark.”

While the app has only been active for six months, the company has grown exponentially since their debut over the summer, due to a business model developed by the FoodHero team over the course of two years, and will soon be expanding to include Metro grocers.

“It was a very well thought out prototype,” said Laflamme. “It was thoroughly tested because it is a complex idea. Because of this, we are working well, and growing quickly.”

However, FoodHero is not the only player in the game. Flashfood, a similar app by Loblaw Companies Ltd., is currently partnered with 139 Maxi and Provigo locations throughout Quebec.

But what change does FoodHero hope to contribute to the overall problem? “Our objective is to have all our collaborating merchants be zero food waste by 2025,” said Laflamme.

While there is still a lot of work to be done in regards to waste in the food industry, Laflamme said that it is the everyday details, like shopping apps, that will contribute to making a change.

“It’s small steps that will allow for us to have a real impact,” said Laflamme.

More information about FoodHero can be found on their website https://foodhero.com/. Their app is available on the App Store and Google Play.

Graphic by @sundaeghost

Article by Catherine Hansen and Gabriela Simone

CSU workshop shares tips and resources for dumpster diving

The Concordia Student Union organized a free dumpster diving workshop on March 12 as part of their weekly DIY series. The two-part event kicked off with a dumpster diving theory class, which encompasses proper etiquette, health risks, legal aspects and a reflection on the eating habits of today’s society. The second half of the event had participants dumpster diving for food and making a meal with their findings.

The event was hosted by Isabella Leone and Coco Graziani of Les Échelles, a collective living space in Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood that organizes free cultural events and encourages the sharing of food and resources. The majority of the food found in their fridge is gathered from dumpster diving. Residents of Les Échelles rarely spend money on food because they often find perfectly good produce that has been thrown away.

Graziani was raised in Italy and has been living in Montreal for four years. She spent the last two years living at Les Échelles and has taken up dumpster diving.

“Having dumpster diving as an option makes me feel less horrible when I eat food,” Graziani said. Dumpster diving allows her to “avoid going to grocery stores and buying things whose production rests on the exploitation of other humans and animals, and contributes to the further degradation of the environment.”

Leone and Graziani said dumpster diving is a viable option for people who want to save money on food and prevent food from being wasted, but it’s often trickier than it seems. While large quantities of edible food can be found in dumpsters, many building owners do not appreciate people rummaging through their garbage without permission.

To have a successful dumpster diving experience, Leone and Graziani said there is some important preparation involved, such as finding dumpsters ahead of time and making sure they are in a public space. Usually, if they are located in parking lots or behind buildings, they are considered private property. Other dumpsters, like those in alleyways, are considered public and can be looked through by anyone.

According to Graziani, proper diving etiquette includes not taking all the produce when large quantities are available and leaving the extras in a box outside of the dumpster.

The main health tip highlighted in the workshop was to make sure to soak produce in a bowl with water and a tablespoon of vinegar to disinfect it. As for moldy produce, Graziani and her friends have a rhyme they use to identify potentially dangerous mold: “Pink and black, put it back; blue and white, you’re alright.”

There are multiple resources dumpster divers can use to find the perfect diving spots, such as food drop-off and pick-up locations, the Health Canada recall website and a dumpster diving map available online. The map shows where dumpsters are located throughout the city, and are marked in either green or red. Pierre-Olivier Jourdenais, a workshop participant, wrote on the Dumpster Diving Workshop Facebook event page: ‘’The red dumpsters tend to be rarely fruitful, according to map markers, while the green ones are more likely to have things to dumpster dive. So, you’re avantaged to go for the green ones whenever possible, for efficiency reasons.’’

Jourdenais is a frequent dumpster diver who follows diving-related pages on Facebook, such as Free Food for Free People, a group created to inform people of drop-off points around Montreal where divers can collect food that would otherwise go to waste. “I often go to the drop-offs in Rosemont,” Jourdenais said.

One of the participants, Marina Kuneva, travelled all the way from Sherbrooke to attend the dumpster diving workshop with her friend, Valerie-Anne Codina-Fauteux, a student at the Université de Montréal. Codina-Fauteux said she likes how dumpster divers “don’t consider the standard way of consuming food as the only good way.”

Photo by Gabriela Simone