Ivo Dimitrov, Founder and Chief Developer of CozZo, a holistic solution for a waste-kitchen, joins Jen Gale of Sustainable-ish for a deep and interesting conversation on how we can have a huge impact on climate crisis just by reducing the amount of food waste we produce and how we can achieve sustainable results in our homes. Listen to the full podcast here, or read the transcript of the talk below.
Jen Gale: Sometimes, when I’m helping people to take sustainability steps and can see that they’re getting frustrated and feel like they’re not really making much progress when it comes to plastic in the kitchen, I suggest a little refocus. I reckon you can’t actually have a bigger impact on the climate crisis by tackling food waste.
A couple of stats to back up that bold statement. If food waste were a country, it would be the third biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after the USA and China. 50% of all food waste occurs in the home, and let that sink in for a minute. Of all the food that is wasted, from the farm through to the supermarkets and then on to us, half of that occurs in our homes.
It’s down to us, so just from those two stats, we can see that if we can reduce or even eliminate food waste in our homes, we can have a massive impact on greenhouse gas emissions and it’s not often that is individuals and families. We have the opportunity to have such a direct impact and it’s actually a relatively easy thing to do and something that we have complete control over.
We don’t need to wait for supermarkets to change their ways or for governments to get off their butts and legislate, which is pretty damn awesome right now. I’m sure as listeners to this podcast, you’re probably sat there feeling a little bit smug and thinking that you don’t waste any food. And even that’s true, then I want to give you a massive hi-five.
But I think if we’re really honest with ourselves, even the best-intentioned amongst us, we’ll forget about the odd Tupperware pot of leftovers tucked away at the back of the fridge or a packet of ham or fish that doesn’t get eaten in time because plans change.
Which is why I was really excited to be approached by CozZo to help promote their food inventory app. It’s super easy to use and they’re having some amazing results. They found that users have reduced their food waste by between 50 and 70% on average, which is pretty mind-blowing, isn’t it?
So grab a cup of tea, sit back, relax, and listen in to how your phone can help you fight food, waste, and joy.
Jane Gale: Hi Ivo, Welcome to Sustainabile-ish.
Ivo: Hi Jan. Thanks for inviting me to your podcast. I am really excited.
Jane Gale: And you are coming to us all the way from Bulgaria today.
Ivo: Yes, I’m currently in Sofia, Bulgaria. It’s sunny outside.
Jane Gale: Brilliant. That was very exciting. I love the power of the Internet to allow us to connect so easily. So you are the founder of CozZo, which is a food-based app. Is that how you describe it?
Ivo: We describe it as a food inventory app – this is actually the shortest way to present it, but it is much more than that.
Jen Gale: So tell us a bit more about it. I have been playing around with the app and it has really helped me get on top of what’s in my cupboard and fridge. But tell us, how did it start?
Ivo: CozZo started as a hobby project of mine. In my family, we were unsuccessfully trying to save food from spoiling. We actually tried everything. We tried notes, kitchen boards, gadgets, and finally mobile apps. We ended up using three different apps to achieve even some results, which was pretty insane.
My wife was furious and said, “No way! You have to create an app, uh, that will work and we will use it. I don’t want to use those apps anymore.” So all these mishaps actually gave me an idea about the design that would be successful.
Jen Gale: Okay. So have you got a tech background?
Ivo: Yeap, my background is in Software Engineering. I had an opportunity to work for some top software companies during the past, almost 18 years. I ended up being a Digital Oil Field Engineer at a Dutch Company. But I left this job in 2016 and started this project. I’m a seventies kid and I was raised in a time when food was not a so abandoned and cheap as it is now. We lived in a house with a garden and I remember doing a good deal of gardening in my childhood.
So, I guess my attitude towards food is somewhat different than the younger generations. I was really frustrated by how much food is thrown away. I did a quick research to understand if this is only my concern or there are other people worried about food waste. I found that a lot of people we trying to shift to a more sustainable, greener lifestyle.
Jen Gale: Yeah. Food waste is actually a big issue on a household scale in terms of the amount of money that it costs us. But in terms of the climate crisis, this is actually one of the bigger drivers and one that we can do something about as individuals, isn’t it? Have you found out some sort of interesting facts and stats about food waste?
Ivo: Some important statistics appeared two years ago and they were shocking. The amount of food waste in households is much bigger than anyone had imagined. The latest statistics that are publicly available show that 50% of all losses from farm to fork actually occurr in people’s homes. 50%!
Jen Gale: So we think a lot about food waste as happening in the supermarkets or with producers discarding stuff that doesn’t sort of reach the right standards. But actually, from what you’re saying, the latest statistics show that 50% of all food waste right from the farm all the way to the fork happen at the consumer and household level.
Ivo: Exactly. The decrease from farm to shop is a result of a series of solutions that have been implemented for producers, for supermarkets, for everyone across the whole chain. But the only thing done for consumers is awareness campaigns. They get all these tips and tricks and ideas, but they don’t have a tool that will turn all this information, all this awareness into a successful set of practices.
Jen Gale: When you said that you were having issues with food waste at home, what were the kinds of things that you were throwing out? What were the reasons that you were throwing a lot of food out?
Ivo: Well, like in any other kitchen, I guess we were not different. Most of the things we found spoiled were pushed to the back of the fridge or the shelves, or the kitchen drawers. Fruits, vegetables, meat, fish. We found frozen things that were frozen for God knows how much time completely undated. But most annoying of all is cooked food.
We always cook with an idea that we’ll eat five portions of Spaghetti, but it turns out that we eat only two or three portions and the rest is, left to spoil. And this is a huge waste. Not only because we have bought the ingredients for this meal, but also because someone invested time to cook it. I would throw away the spoiled dishes without even telling my wife, behind her back, and I guess my daughter, she was also doing this sort of thing.
Jen Gale: [Laughs]. Oh, so you were sort of sneaking some stuff into the bin so she wouldn’t know that her efforts were going to waste!
Ivo: Everyone is doing it. Actually, if we have to be honest, everyone is sneaking, spoiled food into the bin without telling others. That’s not a topic for dinner table conversation. And the result is that everyone is thinking that it’s just isn’t happening.
Two or three years ago they did this research in the UK, and they asked households, are you throwing away food? “Just a little, ” everyone would answer, “just a little.” But when they started looking at the garbage bins of the respondents that is not what they found. An enormous amount of food ends up there and that is how the official statistic came to be – by looking at the garbage bins, not by asking people.
Jen Gale: Yeah. And I think that one one of the certain stats here in the UK is that a third of all food that we buy ends up being thrown away. And I’d be interested to know if that statistic is similar in Bulgaria as well?
Ivo: Absolutely. But it is mostly true for people living in cities. People who live in houses in smaller urban areas usually find other ways of using food in Bulgaria. It’s not forbidden to feed farm animals with food waste. In the UK, there is regulation around that.
Jen Gale: So obviously food waste and any kind of waste feels like it’s an issue that we ought to address. But what are the ways that it’s contributing to the climate crisis?
Ivo: When food is discarded to the landfills, it doesn’t just disappear. Although it doesn’t stay as plastic for hundreds of years, it causes a different type of problem – when food decomposes it emits another type of gas, methane, which has a much bigger greenhouse effect than CO2.
Methane is a gas 80 times more greenhouse potent than CO2. Therefore, even small amounts of discarded food have a big impact on global warming. There’s an official statistic saying that global warming caused by discarded food is as big as the global warming caused CO2 emissions of a country of the size of China.
Jen Gale: Yeah and when you add the statistic you shared that 50% of that food waste is coming from household, then it becomes really clear that as individuals and as households, this is something that we can have a really, really big impact on just by being more on top of the food we’ve got and make sure that it gets used, which is where the app comes in, isn’t it?
Ivo: The app helps you build a new way of managing food in your home. And this new way is actually a combination of many ideas, tips, and tricks, and the app just makes it much easier for you to implement those practices.
And because it is easier, you are also more successful and see fast results, because if something is hard work and you see no results you just tell yourself it is not worth your effort. So that is another thing the app does, it makes sure that your investment in time brings real, tangible results.
Jen Gale: OK. So the idea is that you can literally take an inventory of everything that’s in your cupboards and your fridge and your freezer, and you just have to do that once and then you can keep it updated as you’re going along.
And one of the things I’ve loved about it is the how easy and quick it is just to add everything in. And I love the barcode scanner because you can just stand there and scan everything and it’s on there.
Ivo: A lot of people think this bit is hard work. But this is how it is done in professional kitchens. Our system is actually an equivalent of a system that runs in top restaurants. It’s how a professional kitchen is managed and they put a lot of work into that. So, the biggest challenge ahead of us is to create the same benefit but with much, much less effort for the household mangers.
Jen Gale: So it might feel a little bit daunting at first, the thought of you going through all your cupboards and all your freezer. How long does it generally take people to do a sort of pretty comprehensive inventory?
Ivo: We don’t want to push our first-time users into creating a comprehensive pantry list. So for them, we created something that’s quite fun. When you use the app for the first time, you get a flashcard wizard with 60 basic products. You choose which ones you already have, which ones you plan to buy and it only takes about two minutes to do that.
The second thing that we created, our core innovation, is that we constantly monitor your inventory and when we find something that needs your attention, something that has expired or is about to expire, we push this product to your home screen so you don’t have to open the app.
The notification comes with actions that you can do. You can update the product if it is used up or it’s not yet expired. Finally, your shopping list is very well connected to your inventory. When you cross off items from your shopping list, it automatically updates your inventory. So, I think our inventory is the easiest one to set up initially, and secondly, to keep updated.
Jen Gale: And when you’re adding stuff, it gives you the option., doesn’t it, of the ‘used by’ date or the ‘best before’ date? So if it makes a suggestion, and you think, “oh, I’ve got a bit more time on that”, or “I want that to be longer or shorter” you can fiddle with it yourself, can’t you?
Ivo: Yes, this is another innovation that we’ve created. Cause otherwise, it takes a lot of effort to manually enter the expiry dates of the products. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that product expiration dates are not actual indicators of whether a product has really lost its qualities or is unsafe to it. So we thought, okay, let’s build our own shell-live database. So we paired with a professional chef, got some commercial databases on food shelf-life and we created our own database.
And when you, cross off a product from your shopping list, we automatically add an estimated expiry date for this product. You can easily override this date with the date on the label if you want to. If for example, you’re buying something that’s approaching its expiry dates, you surely have to change the date, otherwise, we will track it and will send you a warning when it is too late, In 90% of the cases, our estimations are actually better than the printed dates. They’re more realistic for sure.
Jen Gale: Yeah. I have to say I tend to largely ignore them, certainly, the ‘best before’ dates and then the ‘use by’ dates. I think a lot of it comes down to a bit of common sense, doesn’t it? It smells and looks and tastes okay. Then by and large, as long as you’re not pregnant or anything like that, it probably is okay.
Ivo: It is, it is actually what we also do, we suggest where you should store the products. So depending on whether you store the product in the fridge, out of the fridge or in the freezer, we’ll give you a different shelf life estimates.
Jen Gale: Okay. And so you said that when you buy something, it automatically goes into your inventory. Can you flip it and use it the other way around and see that you can just sit there with your app open and create a shopping list from that?
Ivo: Yes. For each of your inventory items, you have this button called ‘buy more’. So, if you want to buy more milk, you just go to inventory, you select milk and tap the button and milk goes to your shopping list.
Jen Gale: It would be quite useful if I’m at home and I’ve got to go and get the kids and then we’ve got after school clubs and all that sort of thing. But I just need to get some milk and a couple of other things.
If I could add them to the shopping list and share that easily with my husband for him to pop in on the way back from work, that would be really helpful. So can you have more than one user on the account and share the lists between you?
Ivo: Two months ago we released a major upgrade called the household account. It is a combination of cloud-based services and add-on features. With it you can invite up to 10 people in and all of them will share and we will synchronize the inventory and the shopping list between you.
We will also facilitate some of the communication that happens around shopping, planning. We’re just starting on that. But our idea is that you’ll be able to chat in the context of that particular shopping list or even a particular product.
Each product will carry its additional information created by the users. Currently, you can attach pictures to the products, which is very helpful in my case. I never have to return home and get an angry face because I brought the wrong brand of milk
Jen Gale: Yes. I feel your pain. I think I do that to my husband. We’ve all been there. And can it also help us when it comes down to a meal planning, cause that’s one of the things that I think helps with food waste is having a meal plan for the week and then shopping for that. So it can it help us to create that meal plan as well.
Ivo: Yes. There are a lot of articles on the importance of meal planning and I think a lot of people consider it as an ultimate solution to wasting less. But our research made a very interesting discovery that weekly meal planning may actually lead to wasting more.
Jen Gale: Oh, and do you know why?
Ivo: Yes. The reason is that our lifestyle is much more dynamic than 20 years ago. And because of that, our plans change a lot. Even within a week. You cook 8 portions of Spaghetti on the weekend and by the end of the week you discover that just four of them are eaten and the rest is completely spoiled
Jen Gale: …because plans have changed and people aren’t in when you thought they would be.
Ivo: People are ordering delivery, people are going out, more people are buying lunches in the office, attending dinner parties. Things come up all the time. So our advice is: don’t plan more than a day or two. When you have this information with you at all time, exactly what you have in your home, you don’t really have to do this longterm planning.
Jen Gale: Yeah. Cause I guess you can sort of think, ‘Oh God, what am I going to cook for dinner tonight?’ And if you’re at work and, and then have a quick flip through, see what’s in the fridge without having to physically stand there and open the door and then you can cobble something together from there or know that you’ve got to go out and get a few bits on the way home.
Ivo: Absolutely. We have a special category for cooked meals. So when you cook something, there are always some leftovers. So you just add them to your inventory and everyone knows in your family that there are two portions of Spaghetti waiting in the fridge.
So on the second day, if nobody takes action, you can freeze the portions and say, “okay, as I see that nobody wants to eat spaghetti now, this is going to be for future use but it won’t be wasted.
Jen Gale: Yeah. And I think I we are all possibly guilty of that if we put stuff in the fridge, and as you say, stuff gets put in front of it, or sometimes even just putting it in a box that you can’t see through to remember what’s inside there, and then it just gets kind of left, as you say, at the back. And then, it’s like all you’ve done is kind of babysit it for a few days before having to throw it away rather than throw it away straight away.
Ivo: Yes, what happens is that you turn a blind eye, you don’t look at those boxes. They just sit and sit there and you hope that someone else will take care of them, either by eating or throwing them away, you just don’t want to know about their fate.
Jen Gale: So you then get a notification that reminds you to stick it in the freezer or nudge somebody to eat it? And you can also snap a picture of the delicious spaghetti to remind people what’s in there.
Ivo: The functionalities that are included as part of the household package are the pictures and the barcode scanning.
Jen Gale: So how much does it cost to have the app?
The app is free if you use it in standalone setup. It is perfect if you live alone. But if you are the person in your household that leads this food waste battle, we really don’t think that in the longterm this will be a successful approach.
If you don’t have other people to join you in managing your digital kitchen, it becomes too much for one person to handle. So you can join others by subscribing to our household account which comes in monthly or yearly subscription plans.
The yearly subscription plan, of course, is better value – 18 pounds per year, everything included, as well as all future upgrades. We are going to add a lot of exciting futures by the end of the year. For example, you’ll be able to plan not just for grocery shopping, but for any shopping.
You can build a shopping list for your pharmacy. If you go to the pharmacy, go to the hardware store, garden store, beauty store, you can build, any sort of shopping list for any shopping and also you’ll be able to keep track of things in your home, separated by storage spaces.
Ivo: So for example, storage space is: your fridge, your pantry, your wine cellar, your medicine cabinet. A lot of people are asking us for those things. I’m quite surprised. I thought that this is probably too much, but people want those features.
Jane Gale: Wow, So, eventually it will be something that helps cut back on waste as well.
Ivo: Last week we went through our medicnе cabinet and we threw out a bag full of medicine! I do not want to imagine how much it was worth – at least 200 pounds!
Ivo: Just a few weeks from now we are going to release a feature that allows you to find recipes based on the things you have in your inventory. We have been prototyping it for almost a year and now it is time to release it.
So you would just select the things that you have in your inventor and say, “get me a recipe,” and we’re going to take you to your favorite recipe websites. And you get the recipe from them. We are not recipe specialists, instead, we send you to a website that offers quality, well-written and tested recipes.
Jane Gale: Wow, this is genius, cause often I’ve just stood there with the fridge door open or in front of the cupboard, saying, I’ve got pasta and I’ve got this and I’ve got that and what can I do to make something vaguely edible? So now I can just ask the app to do it.
Ivo: It’s really very convenient. You can do it by typing ingredients in Google but it takes some time to browse. With the premium version, are going to help you do it in five seconds.
Jen Gale: Yeah, if you’re at work and thinking, oh, I’ve got to feed everyone tonight – then you can just do it without even having to look at what’s in the cupboards and things? Perfect, that’s amazing!
Jen Gale: So what kind of uptake have you had on the app and has it been popular?
Ivo: Well, we started almost a year and a half ago. And, I have to admit, it was a terrible beginning [laughs]. I’m quite open about it. We thought it was great, but it wasn’t that good. Probably because the app has really a lot of functionalities. There are millions of applications on the app store and most of them are very, very basic, like two, three features.
It’s not that difficult to create a user experience around two or three features. But in our case, we have so many features that initially, we failed to build a great user experience and make them really user-friendly.
Ivo: It took us quite some time to understand which of our designs are actually working, which of our designs are not working. to simplify them, to automate them as much as possible to hide the complexity of the system from the user. And in the meantime, we are adding more features.
All the time we are getting requests for new and new features and it’s not an easy task to combine, what we already have, with the new things in a way, that the app is really understandable and intuitive. We are keen on making it super intuitive, so everyone will get it in five minutes time, at most.
Jen Gale: And what kind of impact have you found that people have been reporting it has had on their food waste? Have people sort of come to you and said that they throwing away x amount less food or they’re saving y amount of money? Has it been that quantifiable?
Ivo: Currently, we are tracking the progress of our users. And I am happy to say that this year the progress is really noticeable. The people that use it in a stand-alone mode, they usually get something like a 50% reduction in their food waste, which is quite drastic, rarely. It is much more effective than any other existing tool. But for users of our household account, we see over 70% improvement in the reduction of food waste.
And, it’s not just the food waste, when you have this system of planning your shopping, you do less shopping trips and your shopping trips are shorter, more focused, and more successful. Imagine how much time you save if you reduce your shopping trips by two or three per month? For me, a single shopping trip, even though there are convenience stores and supermarkets all around us, takes at least 30 minutes.
Jen Gale: Yeah, and that has a knock-on impact on carbon footprint, as well, especially if you drive to the shops. So wow!
Ivo: Yes, there is a huge impact. Just that currently it’s difficult to combine all the different impacts into a single number.
Jen Gale: but it sounds like the app more than pays for itself – less money’s spent and petrol, less time and all that sort of things.
Ivo: I think you’ll save at least three times the cost of a yearly subscription just the first month.
Jen Gale: Wow!
Ivo: Probably if you live in the States where a shopping trip is something like an hour and a half because there are no supermarket markets around you, it will be much more. Actually, we started in the UK and we just launched the app in the States 6 months ago and very quickly the US users, have become more than those in the UK.
Jen Gale: Oh, okay. So is the app available in Europe as well?
Ivo: It is available in Germany, Austria, Denmark, Bulgaria of course, Spain, and we are planning to launch it in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, in the next two months. Before launching an app in a particular country, we make a localization of the product library. This is the library that helps you enter products quickly into your shopping list and to the inventory, so we want it translated into your native language so that it’s easier for you to use.
Jen Gale: Oh, I see. It’s a big deal. It’s a big job. It sounds big!
Ivo: It’s a big job. And we are a small team.
Jen Gale: How about Australia and New Zealand? It is available down there?
Ivo: Actually it is available on both markets. We just don’t actively promote it, as we currently don’t have the resources to promote it there. So it’s more like a word of mouth – people who have used it recommend it to other people. This is how we get more and more users.
Jen Gale: And just to pick up on that stats that you said, that you’re finding that people with the household account are saving on average 70% of their food waste. If we go right back to the beginning of the episode when we talked about 50% of all food waste occurring in the home, everybody could save 70% of that 50%. That’s a massive global impact that can be had!
Ivo: We did a quick calculation for a presentation that when we reach 200,000 households, we will be able to reduce the food waste by 1 billion pounds per year. Wow. And it was shocking. When we arrived at this number, we went back and checked it twice to make sure it is correct, but it is! This is how much of an impact we will make.
Jen Gale: Wow. And how close are you to that 200,000 at the moment?
Ivo: Not close. No, first because we don’t have the resources to promote our application in a way that other companies are doing it. Surely, you’ve heard about all your food waste sharing revolution. We’re actually going to start a partnership with them. We are very close friends. Another application is TooGoodToGo. Also quite popular and again, we are close friends with them.
Jen Gale: For those of you who haven’t heard of them, Olio is a food waste app that allows you to share food that you’re not going to eat or that it’s going approaching its ‘sell by” date and all you’re going on holiday and allows you to share it easily with your neighbourhood and community, doesn’t it?
And yes. It makes it easy for restaurants and cafes to share any unused food at the end of the day. So actually, those three apps could work really nicely together, couldn’t they?
Ivo: We’ve had an idea with all Olio founders, I’ve talked with them about connecting CozZo to Olio because CozZo warns you two days in advance. So we want to make it a one-button action. When you get a reminder from CozZo, that something is about to expire in two days, you will get a button, share it on Olio
Jen Gale: Amazing. Brilliant. And have there any other plans for it that we haven’t touched on? It sounds like there is a lot in the pipeline?
Ivo: Well, we have started working on IoT devices. Okay. That’s is a bit technical – connected devices. We have plans to introduce a new type of box for your kitchen, a box that you can put pasta, rice, whatever you put in kitchen containers.
But our boxes will be a bit smarter than the average plastic or glass container. It will be connected to the app. So when you put the rice into this box, the application will immediately know exactly how much rice you have in your inventory. It will be automatically updated.
Jen Gale: So then the container will send you a reminder when it’s getting empty?
Ivo: Exactly. You, you’ll immediately see when the rice is used and you don’t have to think about checking on rice ever again.
Jen Gale: Nice. Something that I would just never in a million years have thought of. So, wow, that’s amazing. What have you got, at the moment, is it just an idea, or?
Ivo: We already have the technical design. We have a company that is going to make the hardware because we’re not hardware guys. And we are going to connect the device to our system. Hopefully, these devices will be available in the UK by the end of next year.
Jen Gale: Wow. So where can we download the app if we want to play around with it?
Ivo: So there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the app is on the App Store. The bad news is that the app is not on Google Play. So we don’t have an Android version yet.
Jen Gale: Okay, and are there plans for an Android version?
Ivo: There are plans. We already have some of the features ready for Android and hopefully, all of it will be available next Spring 2020. So for now, if you have a person in your household with an Android phone, you can send the shopping list to this person directly from your app via SMS or email or any other messaging app. Basically, WhatsApp works, Viber works. Any messaging app that you have.
Jane Gale: So the person with the iPhone device can just click and send the shopping items that need to be purchased to somebody with an android device.
Ivo: Yes, the app runs on all iPhone devices and iPads.
Jen Gale: Okay. Brilliant. If we want to find out more about you in general, I know you’ve got a brilliant FAQ section on your website. Where can come to find you?
Ivo: The website is CozZo.app and also our Facebook page. We post a lot of interesting content there. Our blog contains a number of great articles that explain our approach to household food management. And, as I said, our application is not just technology, it’s the set of successful practices that we talk about in our blog – how we see them, things that lead to food waste. We call them food waste traps.
Jane Gale: Oh, share some of those with us? What are the most common food waste traps?
Ivo: Well, one of the most common food waste traps is that when we go to the supermarket, we tend to forget that we already have food at home.
Jane Gale: Oh God. I do that all the time. And then I get home and we start looking at promotions.
Ivo: Yeah. We look at promotions and we buy more than we actually need. And it’s not such big an issue if you’re buying something that doesn’t expire. But if you buying on promotion meat, fish, veggies, veggies, etc., and you already have some of those things in your home, you’re just buying too much. In the end, you’ll throw some of it away. So, it’s really not worth saving on 10% of the price and then throwing away 30% of food in surplus.
Jen Gale: Yeah. Cause as you say, even if you stick it in the freezer and then you go to the freezer two years later and you are, “what on earth is this ice-crusted thing,” you don’t even remember buying it!
Ivo: My freezer is always full and I really don’t know what we have. I mean, I know because it is now in my digital pantry. But we put this question to people. We did this quiz, “do you know what you have in your freezer?” You know, 80% of the answers were like, “I think I know, but only what’s in the top drawer.” The rest is a complete mystery.
Jen Gale: I know where the ice lollies are for the kicks now that it’s hot but other than that…
Ivo: There you are – the top drawer, the most accessible one, the rest are a mystery.
Jen Gale: Well, thank you so much for sharing this web app. I’m just blown away by its potential. It has the impact to really reach those numbers, and once you get to 200,000, to really start seeing that global impact, that can be happening through food waste reduction.
And I think it’s really empowering to think that as individuals, this it’s an impact that we can have. And I know I’ve said that before, but I think when we’re talking about the climate crisis and all these kinds of things, it can sometimes feel like there’s very little that we as individuals can do. But this is a really big area we can really work on!
Ivo: I think that now and time and there is no postponing this action. There is a huge political will. There is a goal set by the United Nations to reduce food waste by 50% in the next 11 years.
Jen Gale: And everybody can easily do that just with the free version of the app. That’s what you were saying, that most people, with just the free version of the app, can reduce their waste by 50%, so then if we can just get everybody on CozZo, to reduce their food waste by 50%, we will have done the UN job for them.
Ivo: Absolutely. Of course, you have to invest some time in it. But the return on investment is really worth it. I promise you that. Really.
Jen Gale: Thank you so much for your time and for kindly Letting me have a trial of the app that I’ve been playing around with and trying my best not to break. Terrific!
Ivo: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure talking to you Jen.
Jen Gale: You’ve been listening to the sustainable-ish, your wonderful sack of loveliness with me Jen Gale. Hopefully, we fired some neurons and we’ve got the old grey matter thinking about what changes you can make in your life this week to live that little bit more sustainably. Do let me know what you think?
I love to hear about the changes that people are making, big or small. Every single one counts. I’ve you’ve enjoyed the show, and I hope you, do hop over to iTunes to leave a comment on a review and then the bots of iTunes will count just how awesome it is and it will show up in more people’s feeds, or at least I think that’s how it works. Thanks so much for listening. I will catch you next time.
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