Low-cost meals made from ‘leftovers’ boom in Asian restaurants!

The supper buffet at Singapore’s Grand Hyatt hotel normally costs around $70 and includes a delectable selection of satay chicken, wok-fried mud crab, and chilled tiger prawns. Those on a tighter budget who care about sustainability can fill a box for a tenth of the price. Tech entrepreneurs in Asia are repurposing food that would otherwise go to waste to provide low-cost meals via mobile phone apps.

According to Preston Wong, chief executive officer and co-founder of Treatsure, which collaborates with chains such as Hyatt, Accor Group, and the Singapore Marriott Tang Plaza Hotel to allow app users to choose and collect a ‘buffet-in-a-box’ of food that would otherwise be thrown out, Treatsure has over 30,000 customers and has saved 30 metric tonnes of food since its inception in 2017.

Typically, users must wait until the end of service to pick up their meals. Even so, it is a far cry from Singapore’s 817,000 tonnes of food waste in 2021, a 23% increase over the previous year. Semakau, Singapore’s sole landfill, should be able to handle all of the country’s solid waste disposal needs until at least 2035, according to officials.

Hong Kong faces similar problems. According to Hong Kong’s Environmental Protection Department, 13 landfills have already been filled and the remaining sites will be filled at a rate of around 3,300 tonnes of food waste per day until 2020.

‘The space is very limited,’ said Anne-Claire Béraud, Hong Kong country manager of Phenix by OnTheList, a last-year app launched in the territory. ‘ Because everything is very dense, there isn’t much space to treat all of this waste.  Users of the app can get a ‘Mystery Basket’ of food for at least a 50% discount from places like Pret A Manger and The Cakery, a nearby cake shop. According to the company, it has sold 25,000 baskets so far, saving 4.5 kilogrammes of CO2 and approximately 1 kilogramme of food.

The first Phenix platform was launched in France in 2014, and it has since spread to four other European countries, saving 150 million meals. It collaborated with the flash sale startup OnTheList to launch the app in Asia. In contrast to North America and Europe, where regulations are strictly enforced, Asia is still developing the concept of sustainable food. Unsold supermarket food is already prohibited in France, and Spain has proposed legislation to reduce waste by fining businesses. In the United States, states such as California and New Jersey have passed legislation to reduce the amount of food that ends up in landfills.