Food Waste
Foodprint
Foodprint is an app that connects eateries to customers and allows users to snap up food that would have gone to waste at a discounted price. The app was launched in Waipā on 2 May 2022.
The app sits apart from any other on-demand food ordering app currently in New Zealand. It saves already prepared food from ending up in landfills and encourages users to eat locally. It is one of the only food apps that has positive effects of the environment.
Foodprint is a free app to downloaded from the Apple Store of Google Playstore and is easy to sign up. Once people have signed up they can use a map to view eateries near them. Users are able to follow their favourite eateries and receive push notifications when they list food.
It only takes a couple of clicks to purchase the food in the app and then the food needs to be collected from store before closing.
Users can leave ratings and reviews and are able to track their savings on food, money and carbon omissions.
For more information and to download visit www.foodprint.app
We opened up Waipā rubbish bags and found 36.6% of our rubbish was food waste. That's 3.6kg a week for every house in the district! Just over half of food waste in New Zealand is “avoidable”, it was perfectly good to eat at some stage, but we let it go bad and put it into the rubbish bin. And sometimes we didn’t even open the packet before it was chucked into the bin! In the audit we found a huge variety of food that still looked good to eat but it was heading in the rubbish to a landfill where the lack of oxygen means it will not compost naturally.
Recipes from the Rubbish
Looking to minimise your waste and create delicious meals from rubbish-destined food scraps? Our 'Recipes from the Rubbish' recipe guide is here to help!
Bread is the second biggest avoidable (was good to eat but we let it go bad) food wasted in NZ kitchens. Check out local Chef, Lylie’s top top three ways to use the bread you have. Yummy bread and butter pudding recipe coming right up!
Share
If you have excess fruit or veg at home there are a few places you can share it. Check out page 6 and 7 of the Zero Waste Waipā field guide for paataka kai and community pantry locations, Crop Swap events and community fruit harvesting.
Love a List
The best thing to reduce food waste is eat what you already have and shop to a list. Keep your list on your phone, on your fridge, on a old envelope, just remember to take it with you. Shopping to a list will save you money and reduce your food waste.
Worm farming and composting is nature's way of recycling. There is some food waste we can’t avoid, like avocado or banana skins, but there is a better way to deal with that than sending it to landfill to add to NZ’s methane emissions. Composting, worm farming or bokashi are great ways to deal with your food and garden waste at home and create rich compost to improve your garden.
Grow your own
Does salad in the bag go bad too fast for you? Grab some mixed lettuce seedlings from your local garden shop or supermarket (look for ones wrapped in newspaper!) and pop them into the garden or a large pot/bucket (drill some holes first). Water deeply every few days and you will have fresh leaves for salads for weeks for about the same price as one bag of salad.
Check our Cambridge local Nicola from Mainstream Green who did a blog series on easy ways to grow food at home.
Love Food Hate Waste?
Waipā District Council supports the Love Food Hate Waste programme which provides lots of handy tips and recipes to help you reduce your food waste and save money. Every year New Zealand homes throw away 122,547 tonnes of food - this is enough to feed the whole of Dunedin for two years! Wasting this food costs the average household $563 a year. So jump online find out about menu planning, storing food types correctly, and there is even a recipe generator to help you if you are stuck with one food!
