5 simple ways to reduce food waste at home

It’s Stop Food Waste Day on the 28th of April. An unbelievably important topic that we at mahabis would like to highlight and encourage our customers to get involved with. To inspire you, and us, to stop throwing away lots of edible and usable foods, we talked to the forward thinking CEO of food sharing app OLIO, Tessa Clarke. OLIO is a free app that connects users with their neighbours to give away spare food and other household items. 3.5 million users have given away over 18 million portions of food to date. And this has had an environmental impact equivalent to taking 44 million car miles off the road and has saved 2.6 billion litres of water. Genius. 

Here Tessa Clarke explains 5 simple ways to lessen your food waste at home, being kinder to the planet in the long run. 

“When trying to minimise food waste in my home, I always try and remember the 5 S’s:

1) SHOP with a plan – It might not sound sexy, but one of the most effective things you can do is to plan your weekly meals, and then go shopping with that plan. I’d always recommend having one ‘cupboard meal’ per week too; that way if your plans change you won’t waste the fresh food you’ve just bought.

2) STORE your food properly – There are hundreds of tips and tricks online showing you how to store your food so it lasts longer. Some of my favourites are that tomatoes should never be kept in the fridge; potatoes and onions should never be stored together; herbs should be kept like flowers in water, and popping a beeswax wrap or some tin foil around the top of a bunch of bananas can slow their ripening by days. Another top storage trick is to make your freezer your friend – it’s not just the obvious like bread and chicken that can be frozen, lots of other things such as milk, eggs and herbs can be too.

3) SERVE smaller portion sizes – There’s a lot of truth in that childhood saying “Your eyes are bigger than your stomach”. So it’s really important to serve smaller portion sizes if you want to reduce food waste. A simple hack here is to use smaller plates!

4) SAVE your leftovers – If you’ve made too much food, make sure to save your leftovers for another day. Leftovers can be surprisingly delicious as the flavours tend to develop after marinating for a day or two. Having plenty of takeaway containers or Tupperware is the key to making this one work.

5) SHARE with your neighbours – If all else fails, and you find yourself with spare food you don’t want or need, why not try popping it into the OLIO app for a neighbour to pick up? Half of all the food added to the app is requested in under 21 minutes, and over 18 million portions of food have been given away so far. It feels good to share, and you could make a neighbour’s day!”

visit the OLIO website and Instagram to kickstart your liberating minimising food waste journey.