2024-03-17 17:09:43
For its fifth anniversary, Montreal company FoodHero will be pulling out all the stops. By deploying its anti-waste application in all Canadian provinces towards the end of spring, it will double the number of partner grocery stores.
“It’s really a very big deployment, around 500 stores in two months. So it’s a lot of work, teams involved, coordination, marketing,” explains the CEO, Jonathan Defoy. The latter calls himself a serial entrepreneur, since FoodHero, whose application was launched in 2019, is his fourth company.
In Quebec, the milestone of 500 participating retailers — from the Metro, IGA, Rachelle Béry and Marché Tradition brands — is close to being reached. Its popularity among consumers is also increasing, with 100,000 regular customers and 300,000 active users. Inflation, which has people looking for discounts, has been a “tailwind” for the tech company. Its sales volume doubled between 2021 and 2022, then doubled once more in 2023.
Operation is simple. Stores identify foods that they believe are unable to sell before their expiration date. “For example, if we announce a sunny Midsummer weekend, grocery stores will order a lot of barbecue meat. But if, ultimately, it rains all weekend, there will be surplus food,” explains Mr. Defoy.
These foods – there is a lot of meat and ready-to-eat foods – are then mostly frozen so that their shelf life is extended. They are then liquidated on the application with a discount of 30% to 60%. It is the demand for each product that dictates the size of the bargain. In other words, a product may be cheaper if it still hasn’t been sold following two or three days on the app.
The exact path taken by these products may differ from one brand to another. Spokesperson for Metro, Geneviève Grégoire explains that, independently of FoodHero, products whose expiration date is approaching are displayed at 30% off on shelves, as part of their own program aimed at reducing food waste. If they are not sold this way, that’s where they are frozen and displayed on the FoodHero app. Food that is still not sold on the app is then donated to food banks.
For its part, FoodHero gets a commission on sales. The percentage of this commission, negotiated with retailers, is not publicly revealed, but Mr. Defoy said he would like it to be higher. “We are 100% on performance,” he emphasizes. If we don’t sell, we don’t have any income. »
Between the dump and the food banks
Jonathan Defoy estimates that more than 9 million kilograms of food have thus avoided the path to landfills. However, it is difficult to assess what proportion of these foods sold through FoodHero would actually have been thrown away, since a portion of them would likely have been sent to food banks.
In a Radio-Canada article published last June, some food banks deplored that mobile applications once morest food waste – such as FoodHero, but also Flashfood, linked to Loblaw, and the European Too Good To Go lead to a reduction in donations from grocery stores. The Metro spokesperson admits that “yes, it may have the effect of slightly reducing donations to food banks”, emphasizing that their commitment to the latter remains important. “Our goal, of course, is to sell the food we bought,” says M.me Gregory.
Mr. Defoy, for his part, affirms that FoodHero has, on the contrary, increased the donations made by several merchants to food banks, in particular by encouraging them to freeze their unsold goods.
“For them, making donations is more manipulation, more management. The fact that it can be profitable for our merchants to use FoodHero, it becomes an incentive for donations, as if one were paying the other,” explains the CEO of the company of around thirty. employees.
Between buyers and sellers
“Marketplace” type businesses are among those that have the most difficulty taking off, since they always have two customers, namely merchants and buyers, judges Mr. Defoy. “We must avoid an imbalance between supply and demand. It was one of our biggest challenges,” he reports. He says he was inspired by the Instacart app, which allows you to place home delivery orders from grocery stores and other types of businesses.
The takeoff of FoodHero was also abruptly slowed down by the pandemic, which occurred less than a year following their launch. Mr. Defoy says he lost 75% of business revenue overnight.
“Grocery stores were busy with health measures, labor, emergency development of their e-commerce. Food waste has plummeted down their priority scale,” he recalls.
But those days are behind him, and deployment in the rest of Canada, hoped for since the beginning, is finally within reach. The next step, which Jonathan Defoy’s team is already working on, is to reach the United States and Latin America.
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