New App BestB4 Tackles Household Food Waste with Smart Expiry Tracking

The app allows users to maintain a 'virtual fridge' that sends notifications when a product's expiration date is approaching and suggests recipes to use it up.

In Europe, each person wastes an average of 131 kilograms of food annually, with over half of this waste coming from households. The food waste issue is global and deeply concerning.

According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Food Waste Index Report 2024, in 2022, 1.05 billion tonnes of food were discarded worldwide-about 19% of all food available for consumption. Of this, 60% was household waste, 28% came from the food service sector, and 12% from retail. On average, every person wastes 79 kilograms of food per year, which is equivalent to about one billion meals thrown away every day.

"We noticed that food often ends up in the trash at our homes simply because it isn't eaten in time. People often struggle to keep track of all the expiration dates in their fridge-especially for items with shorter shelf lives. With the creation of BestB4, we want to help people monitor product expiry dates more effectively, thus reducing food waste and financial loss," said Sandija Opincāne, BestB4 project leader.

The BestB4 app allows anyone to create a free account and start tracking product expiration dates, receive reminders, and get recipe suggestions to use the products in time. The app already features a few recipes in collaboration with the Instagram account @tastyfood_lv. The team plans to expand the recipe database by collaborating with popular content creators.

"We built the app with the help of artificial intelligence and are continuously working to improving it. Right now, it performs basic functions, but eventually, we want to make it easier to add new products-which is still a fairly manual task-and to improve the recipe recommendation algorithm," says Opincāne.

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