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Apps Like Flashfood and Too Good to Go let you buy food that was going to be thrown away

Several companies say they are tackling food waste by connecting people with unsold food from restaurants and grocery stores.

Every Sunday at 2 p.m., Marisela Godinez, the owner of El Mesón Tequilería, a Mexican restaurant in Austin, Texas, used to fill a 12-gallon bucket, plus another half-bucket, with leftover food from the restaurant’s all-you-can-eat brunch buffet. “We threw out a lot of food,” she said.

But a few months ago Ms. Godinez signed up to use an app called Too Good To Go. Now, 10 customers pick up “surprise bags” of her leftovers for $5.99 each, and she sends far fewer scraps to the landfill or compost.

Around the country, apps that connect customers to businesses with leftover food have begun to spread. The concept is simple: Restaurants and grocery stores throw away huge amounts of food every day. Rather than trash it, apps like Too Good To Go and Flashfood help businesses sell it at a reduced price. They claim that the businesses and buyers are helping the environment because the food would otherwise become food waste, a big contributor to climate change.

The apps, which make money by taking a portion of each sale, promote themselves with language that sounds more like a call to arms than a grocery list. “Fight against food waste,” reads the Flashfood description. The Too Good To Go promo calls users “food waste warriors.”

Similar apps are popping up around the world. In Singapore, treatsure started selling leftovers from hotel buffets and recently began partnering with supermarkets. In Hong Kong, Phenix sells from bakeries, coffee shops and grab-and-go restaurants. Tabete follows a similar model in Japan.

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They claim that the businesses and buyers are helping the environment because the food would otherwise become food waste, a big contributor to climate change.