It is typical for consumers to buy more food than they need and then throw it away because they forgot it or because the food is no longer valid. It is estimated that 1.3 billion tons of food are wasted annually, a loss of about $1 trillion.
Review, a pantry tracker app and online marketplace, aims to reduce food waste with a range of features. Users can log their recent food purchases, manage shopping lists, view ‘virtual pantries’ of other users in their area and sell unused groceries to their neighbors. Users can also invite friends and family to share what’s in their virtual pantry.
The startup hopes its app will help consumers keep track of when food expires in their kitchen/pantry and find out what foods they can buy from neighbors in between grocery shopping. In addition, during high inflation, the marketplace tool may provide the everyday consumer with a way to monetize recently purchased food that would otherwise go uneaten and end up in the trash.
The Recelery public marketplace allows anyone within a mile of your location to sell and buy unused grocery items. When uploading an item to the app, sellers can see when the item expires, where it was originally purchased, the pick-up location, and how much they’re selling it for.
Over the weekend, Recelery relaunched its app with updates to its marketplace feature, such as expanding the limit of photos users can post, new flags to show the specific date an item was added, and users can now sell up to 25 items. at the same time.
Before the relaunch, sellers could only upload one photo of the food item, and it was not clear to buyers when a food item was first uploaded for sale. Now sellers can add as many images as they want and buyers can see how long the food will be available. The update also removes completed sales from the market.
As of now, Recelery doesn’t charge transaction fees, so the seller gets 100% of the sale.
Also, this may be obvious to some, but Recelery users are not allowed to sell homemade food products, already opened items, spoiled food, or food products that have passed their expiration date. Users are also not allowed to sell party bowls containing perishable food, baby food and baby food.
Founder Daniel Abrams advises users to use “reasonable judgment” when buying from people they’ve just met online. “You have the right to request photos and contact the seller via text message before completing the transaction,” Abrams told businesskinda.com.
Recelery is free to use and can be downloaded internationally at the App Store and the Google Play Store.
There is also a subscription option where users can spend $2.99 per month or $16.99 per year. The subscription allows users to add over 60 items to their pantry, 60+ items to their shopping list, over 25 items to the marketplace, and access an unlimited number of pantry items created by other members of the community.
Launched in June 2021, Recelery was fully self-funded by Abrams, who came up with the idea five years ago when he first lived on his own as a law student.
“I realized I was throwing away so many products and went to see if there was anything I could resell food or find out what food my neighbors had,” Abrams said. However, Abrams couldn’t find an app that met his exact needs. So he decided to make one.
The company claimed that Recelery is the “first app of its kind”. On average, the app has more than 1,000 monthly users.
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