How much food does your household throw away each week? It might not seem like a lot. But you might be shocked at how much it adds up over the course of a year, and how much you could save if there were only an easy way to reduce your food waste! Enter, the Saveful app…
This innovative app has already been around for a couple of years, launched by Founder and CEO, Kim McDonnell, in November 2023. Kim is passionate about future-proofing food systems and ensuring that all families, everywhere, have food on their tables.
Read on to learn more.
What is the Saveful App?
Saveful is an Australian app designed to help households save food and save money. It is completely FREE to download, and initially will ask you a few questions about your household and cooking and shopping behaviours in order to customise your experience.
Then you simply enter which ingredients you already have hanging around your kitchen, and the Saveful app will generate personalised, chef-created recipes that use up the ingredients that you might have otherwise thrown in the bin. You can customise the recipes based on dietary needs, tastes, and cooking skill level. The app also offers professional tips on meal planning, shopping, and storing food to extend its life.
You can also track your impact, i.e. how much food and money you are saving by using the app, which is a great visual reminder of why it’s so worthwhile.
In a further boon to users, the Saveful app also offers rewards like QANTAS Frequent Flyer Points and Green Leaf badges, which means forming these sustainable habits is even more worthwhile!
Download Saveful from the App Store or Google Play, completely free.
Saveful’s Food Savings Report
In a first-ever report presented in August, and curated by Associate Professor Julia Cairns from Griffith University, it was found that the average Australian household wastes between $2290 and $4352 worth of food each year, which is equal to about 312 kilograms per person. To put that into perspective, that means for every five bags of groceries you bring home, one of those bags ends up in the bin. To make matters worse, 70 per cent of food wasted in homes is still perfectly edible.
As a nation, Australia throws away 7.6 million tonnes of food each year, which costs our economy $36.6 billion annually. Staggering figures, right?
Saveful is on a mission to halve food waste by 2030. The Saveful Food Savings Report revealed that Saveful users, when utilising the app’s features to their fullest extent, reported saving 5879 kilograms of food annually, which equates to an estimated community saving of $32,452 per year. If every Australian household were to adopt the food-saving behaviours of these app users, our country could potentially save over $75 million a year!
Saveful’s food waste busters
🧑🍳 Home cooking frequency – one of the most impactful behaviours, the report found that app users who cook more often waste less food per meal.
❄️ Make friends with your freezer – the top tip of Kim herself, there are very few foods that can’t be frozen and defrosted for later use (also so convenient to have a ‘freezer stash’ for those nights when you don’t have the time or energy to cook!
🍲 Don’t scrap your scraps – make leftovers and scraps work harder! Using the Saveful app to log leftover food encourages creative reuse, such as turning leftovers into new meals or repurposing scraps into stocks or soups (which can be frozen for later use).
🍅 Buy in season – the app has a great guide to this, but knowing what’s in season and buying in season is a great way to ensure your fresh produce lasts longer.
🧺 Smart storage – does this belong in the fridge or the pantry? Can this be frozen? What’s the difference between an expiry date and a best-before before? Saveful has some great tips for you!
🤳 Download Saveful – the best way to avoid food waste in your home is to download the Saveful app and start using the features to their fullest extent!
Are you Australia’s Leftover Legend?
This September, in partnership with ambassador Matt Moran, Saveful is on a mission to find Australia’s Leftover Legend! That is, the superhero who can turn ‘nothing’ into something incredible! Think of the sad vegetables sitting, forgotten, at the bottom of your crisper; last night’s leftover rice or pasta; a packet of mince from the freezer; and maybe a bottle of sauce or marinade languishing in your pantry.
Saveful is searching for the resourceful home cook who can rescue this pack of misfits and transform them into a dish worthy of a five-star review (even if it’s just from your family!).
Think you’ve got what it takes? To join the competition, upload a photo of your best leftover meal to your Instagram Story. Make sure your profile is set to PUBLIC so we can see it, tag @savefulorg and use the hashtag #LeftoverLegend.
The winner of the Leftover Legend competition will take home an extraordinary prize pack valued at over $21,000, which includes a year’s worth of groceries (valued at $15,000), a $5,000 Qantas flights voucher, and a $1,000 Harvey Norman voucher, as well as an unforgettable dining experience at Matt Moran’s iconic Aria restaurant.
The experience features a curated tasting menu paired with classic wines, a behind-the-scenes kitchen tour, and a personal meet-and-greet with Matt Moran himself, with flights and accommodation included.
Fridge Find Falafel
This recipe is an example of one of the chef-created recipes you can access on the free Saveful app.
Scan the QR code below to check out the delicious recipe:
Keep in mind that when you use the app, you can customise this, and a trove of other recipes, based on what you have to hand.
