Retailers reduce food waste, increase revenue with phone appsRetailers reduce food waste, increase revenue with phone apps
Mobile apps such as Flashfood and Too Good To Go empower retailers to reduce food waste and appeal to eco-conscious customers. Find out how they work.
February 3, 2025

At a Glance
- Via Flashfood, shoppers can find and pay for products near their expiration dates that have been discounted.
- Too Good To Go, a certified B Corp, allows stores to create "surprise" food bags for consumers to reserve then purchase.
- These apps offer savings for consumers and incremental revenue for stores—and keep food out of landfills.
Some independent natural and organic retailers are reducing waste, providing a service to needy customers in their communities, and driving incremental revenues—all through a simple mobile app.
Retailers are using apps such as Flashfood and Too Good To Go to make their surplus inventory available at a significant discount to thrifty shoppers.
Earth Fare, the Asheville, North Carolina-based natural and organic retailer with 16 stores in the Midwest and Southeast, started testing the Flashfood app in one store in Greenville, South Carolina, last April. In February, Earth Fare plans to add three additional locations. Flashfood allows shoppers to browse their phones for discounted items on the verge of expiration, reserve them and then pick them up at their convenience. Earth Fare added a dedicated refrigerated case to display the items for easy pick-up by customers, who prepay for the items through the app.
“Our shoppers are naturally interested in protecting our environment, so they can feel good about keeping food out of landfills,” says Laurie Aker, director of marketing at Earth Fare. “This partnership with Flashfood really makes it easy and convenient for shoppers to access affordable groceries right from their phones without having to scour the store and look for deals.”
Each day, Earth Fare store managers review the store’s inventory across all departments to look for items that are approaching their expiration date, then make them available on the Flashfood app for 50% off. The retailer also assembles $5 boxes of various fruits and vegetables that are nearing the end of their shelf life and adds those to the app, as well.

Flashfood promotes its mobile app on an in-store cooler where discounted products are kept. Consumers using the app easily find their purchases here.
Meat, bakery and produce are the top-selling categories, Aker says, although all departments throughout the store—from pet food to health and wellness—can be found on the Flashfood platform.
“It has been extremely successful,” she says. “We’ve received great feedback. It’s really the convenience that folks appreciate, because at the beginning of the day they can check the app and plan their shopping trip.”
Aker says participating in the Flashfood program has not resulted in significant incremental costs to Earth Fare.
“We’ve always offered food at a discount before it gets discarded, but we really haven’t had a way to let shoppers know about the great deals ahead of time unless they’re in the store,” she says. “With Flashfood, we can let shoppers know what’s available immediately.
“Just saving on food waste makes this program and partnership worth it at the end of the day,” she says.
Last year, Flashfood launched a new program geared specifically for independent grocers, called Flashfood for Independents, which includes several features, such as dedicated support teams and easy onboarding, to make the app more appealing to small grocers.
“Our hope is to empower these grocers with a solution that brings more shoppers in-store and puts money back in their bottom line,” says Nicholas Bertram, CEO of Flashfood.
As of December, Flashfood was working with about 30 independents and small chains (those with fewer than 10 locations), which accounted for about 1.2% of the total number stores using the app, a spokesperson for Flashfood told New Hope Network.
Retailers adopt Too Good To Go platform
Last year, Whole Foods Market unveiled a partnership with the food salvage app Too Good To Go, which is a certified B Corp company operating in 18 different countries and across a range of industries, including grocery retail and foodservice.
The company also partners with several independent natural and organic grocers, including Central Co-op in Tacoma, Washington. That retailer has been using the Too Good To Go app to reduce waste in its meat department since 2022. During the past year, it has rolled the platform out across the store.
Central Co-op has been collecting more and more revenue as it has expanded the platform to include foods from more departments, says Amber Quesenberry, store manager. Through Too Good To Go, the store generated just under $900 per month back in April but doubled that total to about $1,800 by August, she says.
Unlike Flashfood, which focuses mainly on listing specific items for sale, Too Good To Go instead offers “surprise bags” of foods that are nearing their expiration. At Central Co-op, individual department managers assemble the bags based on what’s about to expire in their area of the store. The number of surprise bags in each department varies day to day, and individual department managers set the price for the bags, which generally include three or four items.
Although some department managers have expressed concerns about offering items on the Too Good To Go app instead of donating them to the local food bank, Quesenberry says she tries to be mindful of their concerns.
“The team actually had kind of a hard time with it at first, but I just let them know that we need to try to capture some of that money back from our waste so that we can also continue to serve the community and stay in business,” she says. “And I let them know that these [Too Good To Go users] are still people in the community who are hungry that are getting a bag of food for a significant discount, so I feel like it’s a win-win.”
To help ease some workers’ concerns, Quesenberry says she supports some department managers’ efforts to divide their surplus foods evenly between the food bank and the Too Good To Go platform, for example. She also noted that the food bank only picks up food once per week, and the Too Good To Go app allows the store to sell items that might not last until the next pick-up.
“There’s enough for both parties to share,” she says.
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