by Kristine Liao

YourLocal is an app that allows users to buy high quality food at a discount, while reducing their carbon footprint and supporting their local businesses. It is definitely convenient to have overstocked grocery stores, freshly baked goods, and prepackaged meals at our disposal. But in reality, these expectations we have as consumers are contributing to the massive problem of food waste in the United States. Up to 40 percent of the food in this country is never eaten. At the same time, 1 in 8 Americans struggle to put food on the table. All of this “extra” food ends up neither in hungry stomachs nor at compost sites, but in landfills, where it generates methane, a greenhouse gas that can be up to 86 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.

The solution, however, is not so simple. Individuals can do their part by buying only what they need and finishing everything on their plates. But shops and restaurants will continue to overstock and overproduce to satisfy customer expectations and remain competitive in the industry. “It’s a bit of an unfortunate dynamic, but I don’t see that changing in the near future,” says Kasper Kastoft, co-founder of YourLocal, an app that attempts to address the food waste problem by focusing on this misalignment of supply and demand. Currently active in Copenhagen and New York, YourLocal connects users with neighborhood shops and restaurants that are offering steep discounts on unsold food. Most of the deals on the app are at least half off. The result is a win-win situation in which customers save money on high quality food, and vendors earn revenue on what they would have otherwise thrown away.

Although the YourLocal app does not eliminate the root causes of food waste—an unsustainable consumer culture and waste disposal system—it does provide a convenient, and incentivizing way for communities to reduce their carbon footprint by directing food away from landfills. Co-founders Sebastian Dueholm and Kasper Kastoft came up with the idea behind YourLocal when they realized their neighborhood bakery in Copenhagen was throwing out a lot of perfectly good bread at the end of each day. In search of a solution, they began to discuss with local shops about ways to prevent surplus food from going to waste. “I would love it if there were other solutions, but the reality is that there aren’t any right now,” Kastoft says. “We started this from a passion for solving a problem. It just happened to be a great business, too. But it’s really about solving this problem. The minute there are better ways, I am totally hands down for it.”

The two friends quickly realized that a food donation system would not be feasible due to challenges including public concern about food safety. So, instead, they dug up an old iPhone and created an SMS chain. Whenever a shop had surplus food it was offering at a discount, the shop would inform Dueholm and Kastoft, and they would use the SMS chain to alert locals about the deal. One day, after Dueholm sent out a text about half-off salmon, he received a call from the fishmonger: A line had formed outside the fishmonger’s shop, and he had sold out completely! 
“That’s when we realized we had to do something here,” Kastoft says. “There’s a market, and we can solve this problem.”

The idea hit a spot with the community, and very quickly, the two friends found themselves with a network of 10 participating shops and 130 eager customers. In 2015, the SMS chain matured into an app and launched in Copenhagen. Three years later, the company made its North American debut in New York. “Americans are more hesitant about food waste than Europeans, who are ahead of the curve in understanding that surplus food has inherent value,” says YourLocal’s head of growth Dan Ratner. “That’s something we’ve been extremely cognizant of. Our plan isn’t just to embrace the 5 percent of people who are already forward-thinking about the environment, but to shift the perspective of skeptics and show them that there’s really good food that doesn’t have to go to waste.”

In order to establish its credibility among users, YourLocal commits to partnering with vendors with strong reputations and high quality food, often targeting shops with higher price points and making them accessible to locals with lower expendable incomes. Some of the bigger brands that YourLocal works with include Juice Press, The Butcher’s Daughter, and Think Coffee.

With 150 locations and 50,000 users currently in New York, YourLocal plans to continue partnering with large retailers in the area, and also hopes to expand into other big cities in the U.S. But the devastating impact of the pandemic on the food industry has forced the company to hit pause on some of its more ambitious plans. At the height of the pandemic in New York, the app saw a 40-50 percent drop in traffic, which isn’t surprising as a large portion of its users are commuters who check for deals on their way home from work.

But the YourLocal team remains hopeful. During this time, they have been refining their marketing and sales strategies to ensure that they jump back from the pandemic stronger than ever. And at a moment when the nation is witnessing the incredible power of individual action to create change, YourLocal provides a platform for people to participate in something good for the environment, and for their local community. 

“We’ve made it very simple for people to take a stand and make their actions count,” Kastoft says. “You can save a buck, and do something good. There’s really no excuse.”

All photography by Maria Vitoria Photography