When a store has a buy-one-get-one-free deal, it would be nice to have an app that would match me up with somebody else in the store who also wants only one of that thing; then one of us could buy them and we could split the cost. I can't be the only one who doesn't have room in the freezer for a second bone-in pork roast.
I've been thinking it would be a win-win-win situation if I had the choice to donate the other half as money instead of as an item: I get one item cheaper, someone gets a useful, extra donation from me, and the store gets to sell the other item again.
It's only a win for the store if they would sell out of the product if you purchased two, as they would only make the profit off of selling one item to you rather than two. That's why those food bank donations annoy me, they supermarket effectively takes a cut of all the donations.
For emergency preparedness, I keep a few hundred cans of food around. I live in a rural area, and this is prudent.
I never eat them all best-before, and as this is canned food, best-before is not an expiry/safety date, even remotely.
It is a flavour date.
So I donate my stuff, before purchasing new. And before anyone gets all weird about it, I eat from the same stock I donate, even the day of donation.
This means people get good quality food, I get to renew my stocks, and the grocery store with the donation bin, may or may not have been where I bought the food.
If more people did this, we'd all be better able to handle disasters, and those in need would be better fed. A real win-win.
I have had all three possible experiences with food banks (used them, volunteered at them, employee of one) and I would be really surprised if that gets used, or benefits the food bank if it does.
Food banks have grocery store-like buying power and relationships with wholesalers and local producers, and in my experience nearly all of the food they distribute comes from those sources.
The can drives around the holidays are mostly just for awareness. At the ones I worked at checking, sorting and packing those was very costly in labor both paid and volunteered.
We always accepted direct food donations because americans are super fucking weird about donating money to the immiserated, but will also get very mad if you turn away their useless donations. Which is bad for PR, so against the goals of the org. We always accepted them but "how can we not" was a constant question.
Have you talked to the food bank about their policy on past-date canned food? I know at least one food bank where they told people not to donate any food past the date as it will get tossed (plus additional staff and volunteer labor to sort through the stuff). I assume this is common for liability reasons at least.
In most of the US that’d be illegal (unless the four pack was itself a separate product instead of four individual ones). And “two for $5” and “buy one at $5 get one free” are considered different - the first almost always has to work out to $2.50 each unless they get very explicit with a “save $1 when you buy two” wording. Most stores don’t bother.
> In most of the US that’d be illegal (unless the four pack was itself a separate product instead of four individual ones).
Really? Because KFC does this all the time with a la carte biscuits. The per-item rate is higher if you buy four (as advertised on the menu) than if you were to buy one four times in a row.
If it's part of some combo it can fly, but if it's literally "order 4 and get charged more than ordering 1 four times" you can probably report them to the Commerce Department.
Food sharing in general should be encouraged (as a fickle single man I end up throwing away a lot of food, after e.g. opening a jar of tomato sauce and consuming half of it and leaving the other half in the fridge to use "soon"), but that's odd if it only looks in stores.
I'm going to make billions providing an escrow service for food splitting where I guarantee the provenance of items like this. I'll make sure to find a use for blockchain so I can really up my profits.
Don't sell the food; sell an NFT of the food. That'll -really- up your profits. Plus, NFTs never spoil!...until you add that feature. Once you have spoiling half cans of tomato sauce in the metaverse you'll be rich!
Tomato sauce, wine, soups, and other liquid foodstuffs are excellent contenders for ice cube trays. A housemate in university introduced me to 'red wine cubes' from the freezer for chucking into beef Ragu and it turned my world right side up. We now have bags of all sorts in our freezer.
The ice cube trays trick also changed my life after my sister showed me. I even ended buying different sizes of molds to use depending on what I'm freezing.
During the lockdowns I also started with some more traditional preservation techniques like oils and vinegars. Not for long term storage (not enough space) but just for a couple days or weeks at a time. E.g. buying a bag of average quality olives then chuck them in a jar with good olive oil, fresh herbs, garlic, optionally things like chili and an orange rind. Yields both great olives as well as flavored oil for dressings.
I wouldn't consider myself a wine snob, but I'm not really looking forward to being served a nice Pinot Grigio from Trentino (DOC) with cubes of frozen Liebfraumilch. The logistics of keeping matching iced versions of wine sound overwhelmingly complex.
Before covid, I used to bake a batch of three baguettes probably 3x/week, bringing them to work to share. I also brought in growlers of homebrew to share after work. People asked me if, on account of being at home the last two years, I'd been doing a lot more of it. In fact, I've baked and brewed significantly less in that time, and I miss both the sharing and the social time that came about because of those things.
I am also fickle with my food, and a vegan to boot. I solved this problem of leftovers for my situation by making soup. With leftovers, like your tomato sauce, you can always make a soup. Making soup is easy. You can do that in parallel with making dinner, or quickly before breakfast or lunch. You can store and carry it in a thermos flask, or in a simple jar and heat it in a microwave at work. You can also use it as a starter for tomorrow's dinner. Or freeze it for later consumption. Soup, it's great!
I recently got into using tomato powder, have you ever tried it? It would mean more work, but much more shelf-life and granularity of how much tomato you actually want.
I used to immediately throw away half of any load of bread I'd buy because it would always have gone off by the time I got that far down. I would love to have moved that half to a paper bag instead and given it to someone else.