(Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0wYITFUXLk)
Planning the right amount of food is hard, but the Guest-imator makes it easy.
With Thanksgiving just right around the corner (sorry Canadians, you have already had your fair share of turkeys this year), people are getting ready to fire up their kitchens and showcase their iron-chef skills at the dinner table.
However, with all the stuffing yourselves nearly comatose, comes the great prize of unnecessary food waste going into the landfill. If this still doesn’t ring a bell for how horrendous food waste is, here are some stats to refresh your memory:
- In 2016, six million turkeys — a value of around $293 million — ended up in the trash.
- Six million discarded turkeys require an estimated 100 billion gallons of water — enough to supply New York City for 100 days — and produces an emissions equivalent of driving a car across the country 800,000 times.
Yup, Happy Thanksgiving to you, too.
Luckily, Ad Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council’s (NRDC) Save the Food national public service campaign have partnered up to launch a digital portion planning calculator designed to reduce the amount of food, money and resources that go to waste around the holiday.
Created by digital transformation agency SapienRazorfish, the Guest-imator is designed to eliminate unnecessary over-purchasing, saving consumers money and preventing food waste before it starts.
“Preventing food waste before it starts” – rather than targeting at mitigation methods that deal with the food wasted already created, the idea of reducing at creation of this App is so powerful that I believe it will shift the way people perceive food waste.
In my first post on this blog, I introduced the distillery company Misadventure & Co. and how they source their ingredients from wasted baked goods saved from the landfill. Undoubtedly, it is admirable that is company is putting sustainability at the forefront of the company’s mission. Yet, it fails to capture the important aspect of reduction at creation, which I personally believe is the only solution to food waste.
With Guest-imator being one of the first apps to address the issue of surplus food and providing people with easy solutions like portion control in event-planning, we are seeing a major growth in food waste awareness.
