"I wanted to do something for the hotel and catering sector, which has been decimated because of Covid," said Ilana Devillers during one of her first press conferences since the launch of the Food4All start-up in 2018. Devillers was all dressed in green, as if to remind us of her "green" commitments in favour of the fight against food waste.

She made the announcement about launching a take-away service embedded in her application a few hours before a BFMTV programme, where she will reveal that she is launching an assault on the French market with one of the country’s supermarket leaders .

Some sixty restaurateurs and brands, such as L'Opéra, L'Osteria, Victorine, Cocottes, Kaempff-Kohler and La Table du Pain, have agreed to the idea. For a monthly subscription fee, restaurant owners will be able to sell meals at reduced rates of "50% on average, even if the restaurant owner can set the discount".

The application, which will finally be available not only in Luxembourg but also in France and Belgium, will allow customers to see the restaurants available within a one kilometre range and order a meal. To help them make a choice, they will have a photo and a description of the dish or product. Customers can choose the time, thanks to slots defined by the restaurant owner, and will be able to proceed to payment via all the classic solutions.

Once the order has been placed, the customer will receive a QR code, which restaurant staff can scan when they arrive at the establishment. The idea is  not to cannibalise customers who go to lunch or dinner and to keep these meals in the hygienic conditions required by the restaurant industry.

"With a subscription, the restaurant owner has access to recyclable bags, to the application and to the marketing that we will do. There are no other hidden costs. All the money that comes in will go into their pockets," says the winner of the 2019 Start-up Stories contest. The solution has already been tested for a month and a half. F4A hopes to help the hotel and catering industry sell an additional 50,000 meals by the end of the year, or 20 tonnes of goods or the equivalent of 100 tonnes of CO_2.

The Luxembourg company always calculates its impact using these three criteria. Food waste is mainly due to households (53%), far ahead of the hotel and catering industry (12%), but the company says that every action counts.

In 2020, the 232,000 products sold in the supermarkets (or 72 tonnes) saved 138 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. Better still, the partnership with Eden Reforestation Projects has resulted in the planting of 13,000 trees. A figure that Food4All wants to make up for this year, with the sale of 2.3 million products, 724 tonnes of food waste or saving 1,384 tonnes of CO₂. In two years, the 17,000 Luxembourg users of the solution in nine distribution chains have enabled the figures to multiply threefold.

This article  in Paperjam. It has been translated and edited for Delano.