Food waste is not only a moral but an environmental issue too. I’m pretty conscious about producing waste and if there’s something which helps me with that, I’m up for it. Luckily, with the help of great innovations it’s getting easier lately.
Foodji is a new Iphone App that allows the user to track food best before date, choose to use, donate or compost items and reduce food waste to landfill.
But food waste is just going to decompose? – you may ask. Not really. Food rotting in landfill produces methane emissions which are 21 times more harmful than CO2. Also, The UK will exhaust landfill space by 2018 unless we increase our recycling rates (report from the Local Government Association).
A third of all food produced – 1.3bn tonnes – is wasted every year, while 795 million people do not have enough to eat, according to The Guardian The average household could save £39 a month by not wasting food, rising to £60 a month for households with children. (That’s us!)
How can Foodji help?
Foodji strives to encourage the user to either use up their food before it goes out of date, donate it to a food bank or compost it.
How to use Foodji?
Swipe left on your list of groceries to say what you have done with that item. Swipe left on your list of used, donated, etc items (accessed from the settings menu screen) to re-add to your main list thereby saving yourself time adding a new item.
My favourite feature:
Look at your graph daily or weekly to see how well you are doing! The pie chart shows your achievements so you can actually visualise your efforts to reduce food waste.
Top tips when using Foodji:
- If you are short of time when are putting away your groceries, just take a few quick pictures of the item on your iPhone showing the best before date then input it into Foodji when you have a couple of minutes.
- You do not need to Foodji all your food (i.e. milk that you probably use up no problem!), it’s more for the items that you buy then forget about in the back of your fridge, cupboards or freezer!
I highly recommend this app as it tackles a very important problem. The layout and the features of the app is easy to understand and manage. It saves time, money and the environment.
Foodji is available for £2.99 on the App Store but a free version with ads is also available for download, visit the apps homepage: My Foodji