Kitche, the award-winning home food waste app and platform today announces a re-launch of its app with a suite of new features.
Kitche was designed to help families save money and reduce food waste at home. The app offers a ‘virtual kitchen’ for easily tracking food at home, even when out and about, as well as a digital shopping list. Kitche then sends notifications to remind people to use products before they go off, and suggests recipes to help them do so, as well as tips, hacks and food waste tracking to learn what they waste most and the financial and environmental cost.
Since launching three years ago, Kitche has now had over 50,000 downloads in the UK, over 10,000 followers across its social channels, and nearly 20,000 people signed up to its monthly email newsletter, much of its growth having happened this past year.
The new features on the app include:
– A new Impact Section. We’re giving people the ability to see the results of tracking their food waste for the first time! They can see how they are saving water, CO2, money and food. People can create their own identity and mission statement, take on challenges, see a graph of their food waste cost vs the national average, and even earn digital rewards for positive interactions with the app. It’s a way of giving people impetus to record their waste and see how it’s having a positive impact on the environment and, importantly, in their pockets.
– The ability to add food products to the app by voice or scanning by barcode. Kitche already allows people to scan receipts to add products and prices in one go and get automated reminders and categories. People can also manually add a list of products and pick recommended popular items. No other food waste app has a more extensive set of tools to add products.
– A new Explore and Community Section. The Explore page includes a lifestyle magazine-style collection of top Hacks, Tips, Recipes and more. The Community section lets people see they’re not alone in the fight against food waste. People can even become Ambassadors for Kitche and earn unique elements in and outside the app.
Co-CEO’s Kitche: Lynsey Scott and Alex Vlassopulos say:
“The idea for Kitche came after chatting to each other in the park one afternoon about the struggle of having busy lives and cooking for a young family, whilst ensuring food wasn’t wasted. We thought there would be an app that already existed as it was such a clear issue, but we found that there was nothing out there which directly addressed the amount of food waste in the home, despite it representing 70% of the UK’s food waste. We decided to make it our mission to try and fix this so Kitche was born!
“Our original aim was to help people live more sustainable lives and save money, but with the worst cost-of-living crisis in a generation upon us we now feel we’re on even more of a mission. Our relaunched app is easier to use than ever and clearly shows people what positive impact their food waste reduction has on the environment and their pockets. We will keep evolving and continue to make a real difference to food budgets and the planet.”
Helen White, Special Adviser Household Food Waste Prevention, WRAP says:
“One of the reasons why household food waste continues to be a major issue is that we often fail to see how much goes in the bin uneaten, every week. Our research shows that people vastly underestimate the food waste, with the average family disposing of the equivalent of one in eight meals a week. Giving people the ability to record how much food they waste , and how much that costs them – and the environment – is a great way to drive home the real cost of wasting valuable food. “
