How often do you throw away something edible? Yes, despite a standard of living that is low by European measures, food in Bulgaria is affordable, and the consumer system nudges us to fill the fridge until much of what is inside continues its journey to the trash can.
At the same time, both here and around the world, a huge number of people go to bed hungry.
The problem is even bigger not at home, but where more food is offered, sold or, accordingly, left unsold and has to be thrown out. In shops, restaurants, bakeries.
How can a loss turn into pure gain? How can we not only save food, but also get quality products or dishes at a huge discount starting today?
The answer is called foodObox, and it is the work of two young, enterprising Bulgarians.
Food for Thought
Sometimes technology simply helps us remember something our grandparents already knew. Many of you will surely recall vividly the older generations who hated throwing away anything at all. Let alone food. Having grown up in hungry years and before the consumer explosion, our older relatives approached the subject far more wisely.
Jane Dimitrova is from Sofia. She finished high school here and left to study economics in Bologna. Then came a master's degree in founding startups in Rome, and around that time she also started her first job. She found something that both matched her field and let her pursue an idea she had long cherished. As you have guessed, it was about saving food.
Jane was among the first five employees of the Italian branch of the world leader in the field. The venture grew quickly; just two years later the company already had 150 employees… and the young woman decided it was time to return to her homeland and put what she had learned to use. That is how foodObox was born.
Nutritional Value
The project started with the help of a startup accelerator. If that ecosystem doesn't excite you, let us explain that this is a platform that guides young companies and helps them take their hardest first steps. Around that time Jane met the programmer Velin Kerkov, who had also recently come back to Bulgaria, and the two joined forces to launch the project.
foodObox is a mobile app available for iPhone and Android. It has been running since June 2021 and already covers a huge number of venues.
What is the idea?
Every quality restaurant, bar, bakery or pastry shop is welcome to join. At some point each of them is left with a large amount of unsold food that will soon pass its expiry date, and the only option will be to throw it away. Unless… it gets rescued. This is where the boxes come in, the ones the foodObox brand is named after.
A restaurant can announce that it is offering a certain number of boxes of high-quality food, which the app's users can buy at a discount of at least 40 percent. The customer reserves a box and can pick it up at a time of their choosing.
Bread and Butter
Everyone wins. Both the businesses that sell off the food and the buyers who get their products much more cheaply.
And what guarantees that the box will contain something genuinely good? In the end, the restaurant or shop still stands behind it and vouches for it with its name. Just as it does for everything else on its menu.
“Quite a few people are skeptical about this surprise; they think they'll find peels and scraps,” says Jane. “Yes, this is food that went unsold, but it is good quality. What's more, venues present themselves through it and have an incentive to win you over as customers. They are putting their name and reputation on the line. This stigma doesn't exist in many countries; shopping this way is a habit there. It's nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, it's pure heroism to save some food instead of buying new food, even for more money, that will simply last longer.”
This model is already used in many countries, and now its moment has come in Bulgaria too. The network keeps growing, as you can see if you install the app. There are a good number of venues in Sofia, and more and more are joining in Plovdiv, Varna, Ruse and Burgas. There are over 150 partners, and if you decide to become one of them, the place to go is here.
Gourmet Growth
Little by little, the project is expanding in different directions. Some of the big chains will soon join as well, which should help save even more impressive amounts of food and give more people access to discounted meals. Since the chains offer a much wider range of products, users will be able to choose with various filters, so they know whether they will get, say, a meat dish or a vegan one.
Bars and wine shops are joining too, offering boxes of their products at serious discounts: items close to their expiry date or with minor transport damage. foodOboxes are now being prepared even for… pets. Several dog bakeries have added themselves to the app's list.
All of this also gives a breath of fresh air to many of the venues that suffered badly during the coronavirus times. It gives them a chance to reach people other than their regular customers.
Bigger Than Bread
“The discount is at least 40 percent, but it's often much more. It makes sense that the end customer, buying blind, should pay a considerably lower price. It also keeps some venues from joining only for the advertising rather than for the cause,” says Jane Dimitrova.
The project is moving forward. The team now includes five young people who work hard to grow the network fast and help every venue that has surplus food. Their ambition is to one day expand beyond Bulgaria, into the other Balkan countries, where such a service isn't offered yet either.
But there is a long road ahead before then. For now they rely mainly on their own funds and have set low commissions for the service to keep it accessible. They haven't lost hope of landing a more serious investment; funds and business angels have already shown interest.
Meanwhile, they see their project more as a cause than as a business. Soon they will start a series of talks for children in grades four to six about food waste and how to store food properly. “Most people, to a greater or lesser degree, are stuck in a rut, and it's hard for them to change their habits. That's why we think change should start with the next generations. The first step is becoming aware of the problem. People tell themselves, ‘I throw away just a little, it's no big deal,’ but when you do it every day, every family… it becomes serious.”
Those Who Don't Work…
The subject is gradually getting more attention in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian Food Bank has also been operating for quite a few years now, making serious efforts to collect food that is about to be destroyed and donate it to those in need, mostly through social care institutions.
Fortunately, there has been some progress in the legislation. Companies that decided to donate food used to have to pay VAT on it, but that rule was scrapped. Small absurdities still get in the way, such as the requirement that every donated item be relabeled, which is a serious expense when it comes to many small products—stock cubes, for example.
Either way, today anyone can be a food rescuer, thanks to foodObox. Jane uses the app often, at least several times a week. She did the same in Italy as a student, because it let her save a lot of money and get better-quality goods.
…Don't Get to Dance
And today she does it mostly on principle. “Working in this field, I increasingly see food waste as a social problem. So I'm much more inclined to buy something left over from the morning than brand-new produce that would only push other food into the bin.”
We can't do without a few numbers. 700 million people around the world suffer from chronic undernourishment. Around 9 million die every year. In Bulgaria, an average of about 64 kilograms of edible food per person is thrown away each year. Yes, if one restaurant doesn't throw out some of its dishes, that won't directly save the hungry on the other side of the world. But it is a significant step toward solving the problem as a whole.
Personally, I plan to find out this very day what the places around me will offer. I like the idea, and I hope it works, in spite of our usual skepticism about such things. Because the fact is that there is only one sight sadder than food thrown away, and that is a hungry person…
