In the US, households create 76 billion pounds of food waste per year, largely due to  food spoilage, over-preparing, date label confusion, overbuying and poor planning. Regardless of how old a consumer is, or where she lives, or how much she earns, the typical consumer in the US wastes a significant amount of food. To tackle this problem, Use It Up is an app that helps the user to (1) better plan their shopping based on how many servings they want to make and (2) find recipes to use items they already have in their refrigerators. Use It Up helps to reduce household level food waste by combating 4 of the 5 top issues contributing to consumer food waste. The app is currently in the development phase.

TECH & FUNCTIONALITY

In order to achieve the a decrease in household food waste Use It Up focuses on building functionalities that will help to eliminate overbuying, poor planning and food spoilage for users. The app has 3 main features for users – shopping list creation, serving size adjustment and search by ingredient.

The functionality of the app depends on a database of recipes for the user to browse and select from. The recipe database will be tagged appropriately for the core functionalities to deliver the correct results to the end user. For example, each recipe will be tagged for main ingredients that will allow users to search for recipes that will allow them to search for ingredient and find recipes that will be the most efficient to use up the item they are looking to cook. Second, the recipes will be tagged with the number of servings, which  will allow the system to adjust each recipe for the number of servings the user needs to feed. Once the database is built properly the overlying user facing functionalities can be built. The main users features will need are (1)  a simple “add to cart” for each recipe to create a shopping list, (2) a serving size adjustment available within each recipe and (3) an ingredient search filter in addition to the typical filters users are accustom to (meal/course, diet, cuisine, etc.). 

MARKETING & GROWTH

It will be key to provide users a diverse, expansive database of recipes. To achieve this Use It Up will target to partner with companies who already have extensive databases and well known bloggers to drive relevancy in users’ lives. Top targets for large databases are likely to be Food Network, All Recipes, Epicurious and Bon Appetite. In order to provide these partners value we would provide ad space within the app and content development including curated menus for holidays or weekly meal plans to provide users highlighting their recipes. We will target blogs that have a large following, a variety of recipes, and recipes that are accessible to those with varying cooking abilities. Examples of blogs that meet our needs are Pinch of Yum, Kitchn, Smitten Kitchen, Skinny Taste and Simply Recipes.  

We will look to cross promote with these by the “official planning partner” to these blogs and Use It Up will feature these blogs in content such as suggest meal plans and recipes to user in order to help build the drive users to the app and help the blogs grow their following. All partners of Use It Up will be given credit for their recipes and sources will be posted within each of the recipes. Video content and curated meal plans will be a large part of the marketing plan to grow the user base. Additionally, we will provide content on how to store groceries to prevent them from spoiling and tips for more efficient shopping. The main channels to deliver this content will be the Use It Up website and Instagram.  In the longer term when more features can be built out in the app this content will be available all within the app as quick guides.

BETA LAUNCH      

For the beta launch of Use It Up the focus will be on the core functionalities and 2-4 recipe partners to be viable for consumers. The core functionalities for the app include shopping list planning, recipe adjustment by serving size and recipe search by ingredient. These functionalities will be powered by 2-4 partners that provide recipes to the database for users to search. With these base line features Use It Up will be able to achieve a successful proof of concept in order to sign more partners and gain additional investments to build out additional features.

Use It Up’s key features target the reduction in overbuying, over-preparing and spoilage by creating a easier, more efficient way to (1) plan food shopping and (2) use all food purchased. By providing consumers with a way to better plan food buying and help them optimize use of the foods they are purchasing will help to decrease the amount of waste each households produce. 

 Sources

 “Food Waste Is a Massive Problem-Here’s Why.” FoodPrint, 2020, foodprint.org/issues/the-problem-of-food-waste/.

Gunders, Dana. “Wasted: How America Is Losing Up to 40 Percent of Its Food from Farm to Fork to Landfill .” NRDC, 2012, www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf.