10 Apps to Reduce Food Waste: Ranked & Reviewed By Experts

Too Good To Go operates as a localized marketplace that distributes surplus food generated by foodservice and retail businesses. This food waste management app is built on the premise of rescuing perfectly good food at the end of the day, transforming a potential business liability into a valued resource. A key metric tracked is the user’s environmental impact. Every meal saved is equivalent to avoiding 2.7 kg of CO2 emissions, giving users a tangible sense of their positive effects.

The app's interface prioritizes discovery, using geolocation to show users nearby businesses with unsold food. This surplus food is packaged into "Surprise Bags," typically containing high-quality items and selling for about a third of the original retail price.

This is helpful for maximizing savings on essential grocery and baked goods items. The in-app impact tracker is a standout, clearly showing users their CO2e savings and linking their purchase directly to an environmental benefit.

The app handles secure in-app payments and provides a simple process for you to collect their bag during a pre-set pickup window. This streamlined, transaction-based approach has enabled it to scale rapidly and become a leader in cutting food waste, effectively converting surplus into savings for millions of users globally.

Phenix is a prominent French-based technology company whose app is a major player among European food waste reduction apps. The platform's mission is to send unsold food from local businesses (grocery stores, caterers, and bakeries) to consumers.

The core consumer functionality revolves around purchasing discounted anti-waste baskets, often sold at half their original price. Its key differentiator is the classification system. You can choose the type of food basket they reserve, such as "fruits & vegetables," "cakes," or "to cook," to help avoid unpleasant surprises and ensure the food aligns with immediate meal needs.

You also get a geolocation service to find nearby merchants. This app also offers incentives to engage with the app: you can earn rewards for buying food through this app. Furthermore, you can join its community to get top products at the best prices, ensuring you are always among the first to secure desirable items. It also offers a custom alert system to mark "favorite" stores or basket types and receive push notifications the moment they become available (essential for securing high-demand offers).

Misfits Market is one of the leading apps to reduce food waste, built on a core mission to create a more sustainable food system. With every order, you prevent waste by shopping a curated selection of rescued items. This includes surplus food and products with packaging errors sourced directly from top brands and farmers.

To keep the selection fresh, this grocery shopping app adds new items weekly, rescued from across multiple brands. This is helpful because you can create an order from 700+ high-quality items, including organic produce, sustainably sourced pantry staples, high-quality meats, and seafood. 

Its "Find New Favorites" system is also noteworthy. The app provides easy-to-navigate grocery aisles, filters, and a favorites list to make shopping incredibly fast. The app is built for convenience, letting you skip in-store shopping, manage your orders, and receive delivery notifications—all from your phone.

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Olio is branded as a peer-to-peer sharing application, which is a local exchange-oriented. It mainly aims to match people with food and other non-food products to neighbors who could use them. To post something that can be claimed by different people, one just needs to take a picture, add a short description, and a pick-up point, and it will be posted to the local feed.

Olio also offers a Food Waste Heroes program that helps you repurpose unsold food from local shops and cafes and is designed to reduce commercial waste.

This app for preventing food waste further helps reduce weekly food costs by connecting you with discounted surplus from local stores. This is achieved through two main features: the Lucky Dip bags (mystery bags of food sold at up to 80% off) and the Reduced Food feature, which shows real-time discounts on expiring items directly from partner shops. The platform emphasizes secure messaging and public ratings to ensure a safe, trustworthy, community-driven environment for the transfer of goods.

FoodHero operates as a mobile platform that connects you directly to grocery stores with surplus food, making it one of the leading food waste reduction apps focused on the retail sector. The app provides a curated digital shelf of items that are approaching their best-before date, which are then marked down, often by 50% or more. This process is engineered to prevent retailers from discarding high-quality food, thereby directly saving consumers money.

You can browse the current, real-time inventory and select the exact items they want, rather than accepting a mystery bag. It lets users filter available items by category. This significantly speeds up finding specific items for a weekly meal plan (e.g., searching only for discounted chicken or fresh vegetables).

The process is straightforward: reserve and pay for the items in the app, and then collect them during a specified window at the customer service desk of the participating store. This is helpful for budget-conscious families looking to stock up on expensive perishables like meat and seafood at a fraction of the cost. This app that helps to cut food waste proves that saving the planet and saving money can be achieved through smart, real-time purchasing decisions.

Fridgely is a clean, dedicated inventory app that focuses on eliminating manual data entry, making it an effective tool among anti-food waste apps. The app comes with plenty of AI features, starting with receipt scanning. You can snap a photo of their grocery receipt, and the app uses optical recognition to instantly add the items to their virtual kitchen.

In addition to this, there is Barcode Scanning. You only need to scan a product, and Fridgely will automatically recognize it and provide an estimated expiration date. This inventory is maintained in an extensive Pantry Manager that allows arranging items in distinct lists into the fridge, freezer, and pantry.

The app prevents spoilage with a robust alert system that sends notifications about items that are about to expire. You can customize exactly when you receive these warnings. We liked this feature, especially its ability to reduce unnecessary duplicate purchases, a major source of household waste.

Karma is a pioneering Swedish food waste app that connects consumers with surplus food from a diverse ecosystem of businesses. The app is dedicated to "Radical Slacktivism," promoting the idea that users can combat climate change through simple, daily actions, such as eating discounted surplus food.

Its operational scale is impressive: it connects users with more than 9,000 connected restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries and cafes in the UK and Sweden to buy takeaway food. Furthermore, it boasts a strong local presence, with live events in over 200 cities, including Malmö, Uppsala, Umeå, Enköping, Norrköping, Borås, Kalmar, and Västerås!

The app's approach focuses on a detailed, item-by-item listing. This design offers a significant advantage for you if you have allergies or strict dietary preferences. You can select exactly what you want and purchase highly specific meals for immediate consumption, optimizing both convenience and budget.

Food Rescue Hero is a nonprofit technology platform focused on the safe and efficient transportation of surplus food. Most anti-food waste apps sell leftovers to consumers. This one uses volunteers instead. You pick up surplus food from businesses like grocery stores and caterers, then deliver it to local nonprofits.

Its core value is to centralize and mobilize a community of volunteer drivers, providing the infrastructure for large-scale food recovery. When a donor posts available food, the app instantly alerts nearby certified volunteers. The app finds the fastest route for you, so deliveries are quick and food stays fresh. It also has an Impact Tracking feature that lets you instantly see the difference they are making both in their community and the environment. You can also share rescue details directly from the app on social media to spread awareness and inspire others to join.

nosh is a highly intelligent inventory app that positions itself as one of the most data-driven food waste reduction apps available. Its core value lies in its use of AI not only to track what you have but also to analyze how you can avoid waste.

The "Easy product registration" is a key starting point. You can add a product (grocery, food, or even medicines) manually or by using the barcode or scan receipt feature. Once logged, the app provides smart inventory & expiry date tracking. We found this helpful for monitoring remaining stock, tracking removals, and managing all dates (use-by, best-before). The app also categorizes products into five groups (fridge, freezer, pantry, medicine, and uncategorized) for smooth organization.

This detailed inventory powers two key functions. First, similar to a cooking app, it suggests a catalogue of quality recipes based on the items you have on hand. Second, it features a smart shopping list. We liked this feature because you can copy stocked and expired food items to the shopping list with a simple swipe gesture.

You can use the in-app QR Code scanner to transfer your inventory or shopping lists to other users. This makes planning easier by ensuring everyone in your household knows exactly what is in stock and what needs to be bought. It also features a smart shopping list that lets users swipe to add expired or finished items for easy restocking.

NoWaste is one of the best apps that help to reduce food waste that is entirely based on home inventory management. The design is clean and intuitive, making daily inventory tracking simple and consistent, with separate lists for each storage location (e.g., pantry, fridge, freezer).

The feature set is ideally designed to ensure it does not spoil: the Barcode Scanner is a significant time-saving tool for entering packed foods. This can greatly accelerate initial configuration and day-to-day maintenance, which is usually the largest barrier to inventory applications.

One of the core functions is the ability to search and see whether a specific grocery product is available before you go to the store. An effective entry system supports this: users can add food from a library of more than 200 items and easily manage stock levels.

The app’s Expiration Reminder System is also noteworthy, which sends alerts based on user-defined lead times (e.g., 3 days before expiration). Additionally, the app includes a Waste Tracker where users can record items they actually threw away, providing personalized statistics on the types and quantities of food they waste. It provides clear, personalized data that helps users identify patterns and change their shopping or storage habits. This makes it a powerful and effective tool among apps to reduce food waste for long-term behavioral adjustment.

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