An Overview Of Our Solution
Eateries routinely throw away perishable food because there are few incentives or mechanisms for donation. For example, some of the bakeries we spoke to throw away 100+ pieces of bread every day, and a KFC branch manager in Nigeria was embarrassed to admit that 75 portions of fried chicken end in the bin every two hours.
With Pona, our partners simply enter the number of unsold food items in the app, and we push a time-limited offer to customers in the area who can rescue that food.
It's a win-win-win for foodies, businesses, and our planet.
- Population Impacted: -
- Continent: Europe
Last name
Organization type
Context Analysis
We operate a marketplace for unsold (surplus) food, focusing initially on the Nigerian ready-to-eat food market. In recent years there has been an explosion in quick service restaurants—notably foreign franchises—in addition to the traditional takeaway eateries, where food is typically prepared in advance in bulk, and selected by the consumer in front of their eyes for either immediate or same-day consumption.
Traditional traders see food waste as an inevitable part of doing business, and often don’t have the equipment to store food overnight to sell the next day. Newer players are held to strict international franchisee standards, which encourage colossal waste of food for quality and texture reasons.
Image-conscious eateries are reluctant to do a mass time-sale to all of their customers lest they cheapen their brand. Smaller eateries and bakeries have sufficiently high margins that they routinely over prepare food on the basis that customers like buying from a full shop.
Describe the technical solution you wanted the target audience to adopt
We encourage eateries and bakeries to sell their unsold food to users of our app while it is still comfortably fit for consumption. Eateries list their inventory on our app, indicating dietary restrictions and nutritional content, and choose a suitable visual illustration from our library. Then, when it becomes apparent that a certain food item will not sell out during normal trading hours, a team member of the eatery can offer it for sale in just two taps, allowing potential customers to be notified of the sale via push notification, a notice indicating the timeframe in which the food must be picked up, and a simple checkout allowing them to purchase the food in-app in two taps.
Type of intervention
Describe your behavioral intervention
Typically lower-tier restaurants don’t keep an inventory of leftover food. This is for two principal reasons. The first is that they don’t typically have sophisticated stocktake and inventory systems, and don’t keep records of sales and trends, instead preferring to operate on the basis of instinct and experience. Additionally, there is a legal requirement to provide staff with a meal, and this meal is often provided from the surplus food at the end of their shift. Some managers conceived any leftover food to be “not mine anymore but the staff’s”
Furthermore, in the majority of the 150 restaurants in Lagos we surveyed, there was no laptop or computer in the establishment; just 3 didn’t have a smartphone.
We encourage restaurants to incentivise their staff to put unsold food for sale with two taps of a smartphone app. Vigilant and conscientious staff members can identify products that are likely to perish soon, and in two taps offer them for sale via their own smart phone by simply selecting the product in question, without needing to worry about adding any additional information such as pictures, descriptions or allergen information.
Although we have not made significant inroads in the consumer side of the marketplace, our user testing has indicated that customers would be glad to receive a push notification during the times of the day that they are commuting back from work to home, with a list of unsold food available, and providing the eatery is en route.
As needed, please explain the type of intervention in more detail
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Describe your implementation
Our challenge fell into two parts. The first was to persuade eateries to use our platform, and the second is to ensure that the daily offering of food for sale was habitual.
For the first challenge, we addressed three core concerns of restaurants.
The first concern was that they wouldn’t have enough waste food to justify the effort and perceived expense of registering on the platform. To address this, we employ local agents who help onboard restaurants, walking them through the process of entering their food items to the app. This process can be done with a basic smartphone, and we charge no upfront fee. Additionally, we only charge restaurants a success fee (30% commission on any sale made through our platform), meaning that there is no capital expenditure required.
The second concern was that the use of the app would undermine their relationship with existing customers, and a daily 50%-off sale lessen the brand value of their restaurant. To address this, we enforce pre-payment of food bought through the app, so customers who buy food using our platform can discreetly pick it up in a matter of seconds. Furthermore, since the store POS does not need to be used, the pick up time can be after the end of formal trading, and after the register has been balanced.
Finally, we sought to understand the pressures of restaurants—and their front-line workers—to understand how Pona can fit into their existing workflow, since a frequent concern would be that offering a timesale would require input from management each day. We learned that limiting the input to just two variables meant that most management would trust any staff member to manage the process of selling perishable foodstuffs. Staff would indicate the quantity of the item that is left over, and by what time the food should be picked up. Management may at any time access reports on their smartphone, equipped with data that can be used to provide incentives for staff to generate revenue from the food.
External connections
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Who adopted the desired behaviors and to what degree?
We have tested our approach in a closed beta with a handful of small to medium size eateries. In Lagos, over 80 of the 150 restaurants we approached remarked that our visit alone had caused them to consider the issue of food waste for the first time. A handful were aware of the issue, and were looking for solutions, but resorted to simply giving the food away, or offering a 50% off flash sale to all of their customers at the end of the day. We have over 100 restaurants who are excited to launch on the platform once we come out of beta.
How did you impact natural resource use and greenhouse gas emissions?
The part of the value chain we are tackling is uniquely difficult to qualify. 100g of ready-to-eat food represents not only the energy expenditure required to produce and transport the raw materials that make up the food, but also the energy used to preserve, prepare, heat, serve, and store. Not to mention the wasted human labour. We estimate that rescuing ready-to-eat food is on average twice as environmentally impactful as any other part of the value chain.
What were some of the resulting co-benefits?
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Sustainability
We take a 30% fee from each transaction using our platform, and benefit from economies of scale as we launch in new cities and onboard new restaurants.
Return on investment
We developed the project using funds from our previous startup for <$50,000USD
How could we successfully replicate this solution elsewhere?
Our anticipation is that once we have scaled within our launch cities, we would be able to use our agent model to rapidly expand to new markets. Using local agents to onboard and support restaurants that would be paid a commission on all sales that are generated through restaurants that they are responsible for.