French entrepreneurs create app to combat food wastage

A mobile application, launched last October by two French entrepreneurs, connects shop owners in Paris with customers in the vicinity to offer them discounts on unsold products and help tackle the wastage of food.

The businesses include mini supermarkets, grocers and bakeries which sell products with an expiration date.

Each day a shopkeeper subscribing to the app called 'OptiMiam', details his inventory online indicating his surplus stock and the relevant discount, a minimum of 15 percent.

These discounts flash onto the cellphones of customers in the vicinity in real time with the time limit of the particular promotion. Customers are both those who are seeking a good deal and those who are conscious of their carbon footprint.

The co-founder of the application, Raodath Aminou, described the procedure and how promotions appeared to potential customers.

"As I launch the mobile application, it finds my location using GPS and shows all the deals around me in terms of distance," she said.

One user, manager of a chain of bakeries in the French capital, Mr. Mimouni, saw great financial and environmental benefits of using the app.

"In brief, food sellers, bakers and pastry chefs, we very regularly have a lot of perishable goods, depending on the day, we can have anything up to 10-20 percent of our stock which is put in the bin, and so the application OptiMiam allows us, thanks to this concept, to first of all not to waste all this food and all this work," he said.

The app, currently has 90 Parisian businesses as subscribers and the team hopes to have 1,500 in three years.

In the first nine months the application was downloaded 22,000 times and the founders hope to raise the necessary funds to extend their app outside of Paris.