“The fact that it got a little viral shows that there are many other young people around the world, working/studying and living alone in cities who don't want to waste food either… For products with very short shelf lives, you should have an option to buy them in smaller quantities.”
That was the simple premise dreamed up by Prashant Baid who, like so many in the internet era, has seen that premise find an audience and become something much bigger.
Baid spoke with NPR about his desire, as someone who lives alone, to not have to buy family-sized quantities of food that would mostly go to waste. Specifically, he wanted to eat bread without having to buy an entire loaf only to have half of it get thrown out.
“I love bread but I can't be eating 20 slices in 3 days,” Baid said. “Bread has such a short shelf life and I don't want to waste food, so it makes more sense to buy bread in smaller quantities. Sure you can freeze 'em, but it doesn't taste as good as fresh bread.”
So Baid, an app developer in his spare time, created a website: halfloafnear.me.
The conceit was simple: Help people locate stores that sell the harder-to-find half-loaves of bread locally near his home in India.
The site received over 16,000 hits in its first 12 hours online.
While the site only currently works for those living in India like Baid, he told NPR he has received a ton of interest from Americans, and that’s not exactly shocking when taking into account numbers from the USDA: About 133 billion pounds of food was wasted in 2010 alone in the U.S., totally about $161 billion.
The experience has taught Baid that people halfway around the world have similar everyday grievances, and that Americans are also “annoyed that the stores there also have very limited availability of half-loaves of bread.”
No word yet on whether or not Baid will push the app out to other parts of the world, but there certainly seems to be no shortage of interest from foreign consumers.
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