Britain has a strange problem.
Some households struggle to afford enough nutritious food while, elsewhere in the same food system, perfectly edible food is thrown away.
The UK wastes an estimated 10.7 million tonnes of food every year. Around 6.4 million tonnes of that waste comes from households, including approximately 4.7 million tonnes of food that could have been eaten.
At the same time, food insecurity remains a significant problem. Government figures show that the proportion of food-secure households fell from 92 per cent in 2019/20 to 90 per cent in 2023/24, while 4.2 per cent of people lived in households that had used a food bank during the previous year.
The contradiction immediately creates an obvious question. If Britain has surplus food in one place and people who need affordable food somewhere else, why can technology not connect the two?
Companies including Too Good To Go and OLIO have already demonstrated that technology can help.
The next opportunity may be considerably bigger.
Too Good To Go Proved That Surplus Can Become a Marketplace
Too Good To Go started with a relatively simple proposition.
A bakery, restaurant or supermarket reaches the end of the day with food it cannot sell tomorrow. Instead of throwing that food away, the business lists it through an app and a customer purchases it at a reduced price.
The company has turned that simple idea into the world’s largest marketplace for surplus food.
By 2024, more than 40,000 UK businesses had signed up to sell surplus food through the platform. Globally, Too Good To Go now reports 120 million registered users and 180,000 business partners across 21 countries.
The lesson for founders is important.
Waste can become inventory when somebody creates the infrastructure required to identify a buyer.
OLIO Took a Different Approach
OLIO approached the same underlying problem from the community level.
Its platform allows neighbours to share unwanted food and other household items rather than throwing them away. It subsequently expanded its model through its Food Waste Heroes programme, connecting volunteers with businesses that have surplus food to redistribute.
The concept attracted substantial venture investment. In 2021 alone, OLIO raised a $43 million Series B round to accelerate its international expansion and food-redistribution operations.
Both OLIO and Too Good To Go demonstrate that digital platforms can successfully match surplus with demand.
But matching is only one part of the problem.
Britain Is Still Wasting Food at Enormous Scale
WRAP estimates that the UK produces approximately 10.7 million tonnes of food waste annually.
By comparison, organisations involved in surplus-food redistribution received approximately 210,000 tonnes of surplus food during 2024.
That redistribution represented around 500 million meals worth approximately £870 million, and the amount being redistributed is growing. Between 2022 and 2024, volumes increased by 27 per cent.
This is significant progress.
It also demonstrates the scale of what remains.
The figures cannot be compared perfectly because “food waste” and “surplus food available for redistribution” are not the same thing. Some food waste is inedible, some occurs inside households, some cannot safely be redistributed and prevention should always come before redistribution.
Nevertheless, there remains substantial edible surplus throughout the food system.
The technological opportunity is therefore not simply finding somebody willing to eat unwanted food.
It is building the infrastructure capable of moving usable food through the system before time runs out.
Food Has an Expiry Clock
A marketplace for second-hand furniture has an advantage that a marketplace for surplus strawberries does not.
The sofa can wait.
Food cannot.
A pallet of surplus vegetables may have value this morning and significantly less value several days later. Chilled food may require refrigeration. Frozen food requires appropriate storage. Prepared meals create additional food-safety considerations.
The system therefore needs to know considerably more than whether surplus exists.
It needs to understand what the food is, how much exists, where it is located, how long it will remain usable, what temperature it requires, who can accept it and whether transportation is economically viable.
That transforms food redistribution from an app problem into a logistics and data problem.
The Missing Infrastructure May Be a Surplus Food Network
Imagine a supermarket distribution centre discovering that it has 20 pallets of vegetables approaching the end of their commercially useful life.
Today, people may need to identify redistribution partners, make telephone calls, arrange collection, determine available storage capacity and decide where the food should go.
Now imagine that process becoming digital.
The inventory system identifies the potential surplus automatically. Software determines how long the products will remain usable. Nearby charities, community organisations, secondary markets and food processors with suitable storage are identified. Available refrigerated transport is located and routes are calculated.
The system could then determine the highest-value appropriate destination before the food becomes waste.
This would be more than another food-sharing app.
It would be infrastructure for surplus.
Artificial Intelligence Could Prevent the Surplus in the First Place
There is an even better solution than redistributing food.
Do not create the surplus.
Artificial intelligence is particularly interesting here because food businesses constantly have to predict future demand.
How many sandwiches should a supermarket stock tomorrow? How much chicken should a hotel prepare for breakfast? How many meals will a university cafeteria serve? How much fresh produce should a distribution centre order?
Produce too little and customers encounter empty shelves.
Produce too much and food ends up in the bin.
AI can analyse historical sales, weather, events, holidays, local demand and other information to improve those forecasts.
The economic incentive is powerful because preventing waste also prevents businesses from purchasing food they never sell.
AI Is Already Watching What Goes Into the Bin
British technology company Winnow provides a useful example of what this looks like inside commercial kitchens.
Its system combines cameras, scales and artificial intelligence to recognise food as it is discarded. Instead of kitchen staff manually recording every item thrown away, the system automatically collects information about what is being wasted.
The software can then identify patterns.
Perhaps too much rice is being prepared every Tuesday. Perhaps one dish consistently returns from customers unfinished. Perhaps breakfast production routinely exceeds demand.
Those observations can change purchasing and preparation decisions.
Winnow says its technology now operates across more than 3,500 sites in 94 countries. In May 2026, the company reported that its decade-long partnership with IKEA UK had generated more than £14 million in food-cost savings.
That demonstrates something important about food-waste technology.
The environmental argument can also be a productivity argument.
Britain’s Food Factories Have Their Own Technology Gap
The opportunity extends well beyond restaurants and supermarkets.
Food and drink is Britain’s largest manufacturing sector, employing almost half a million people.
Research published by the Food and Drink Federation and Newton identified an untapped opportunity worth as much as £14 billion through improving productivity across UK food and drink manufacturing.
AI, robotics, automation, data analytics and digitalisation are expected to play important roles in capturing that opportunity.
A modern food factory produces enormous quantities of operational information. Sensors can monitor equipment. Computer vision can inspect products. AI can forecast demand. Robotics can automate repetitive processes. Digital twins can model production lines.
Technology can therefore attack food waste much earlier in the chain.
The cheapest surplus to redistribute is ultimately the surplus that was never produced unnecessarily.
Government Is Starting to Experiment With Food Data
The government is also beginning to recognise that food insecurity is partly an information problem.
In July 2025, it announced £8.5 million for six projects designed to tackle food inequality.
One project in Liverpool is developing a digital mapping system that identifies communities where people have poor access to fresh and nutritious food. That information can then be used to direct a mobile greengrocer towards areas where it is most needed.
This is a small experiment compared with Britain’s overall food system.
But the underlying idea is powerful.
What happens when we map food demand as intelligently as companies map consumer demand?
A supermarket knows where its customers are.
A delivery platform knows where its drivers are.
A logistics company knows where its vehicles are.
Britain could become considerably better at understanding where food insecurity and food surplus exist at the same time.
The Opportunity Is Bigger Than Redistribution
The emerging food-tech landscape contains several different opportunities, and they address different parts of the problem.
| Opportunity | What Technology Could Do |
|---|---|
| AI demand forecasting | Predict how much food retailers, restaurants and manufacturers actually need before surplus occurs. |
| Automated waste monitoring | Use computer vision and sensors to identify what businesses repeatedly throw away. |
| Surplus matching platforms | Match available food with charities, community organisations, secondary markets and other appropriate users. |
| Cold-chain marketplaces | Identify available refrigerated storage and transportation before perishable food expires. |
| Dynamic pricing | Automatically reduce prices as products approach the end of their commercial shelf life. |
| Food-access mapping | Identify communities where access to affordable nutritious food is particularly weak. |
| Farm-surplus platforms | Create routes to market for crops that are edible but rejected because of appearance, oversupply or changing demand. |
| Traceability infrastructure | Give organisations better information about origin, condition, movement and shelf life throughout the supply chain. |
The most powerful company might ultimately connect several of these layers.
What If Britain Had a Real-Time Map of Surplus Food?
The more ambitious opportunity would be to create something approaching a digital map of Britain’s surplus-food system.
Retailers could publish surplus automatically from their inventory systems. Manufacturers could expose excess stock. Farms could identify crops without commercial buyers. Charities could publish demand and storage capacity. Logistics companies could expose spare refrigerated transport.
AI could continuously match supply and demand.
The platform would not simply ask where food is available.
It would ask where that particular food can create the greatest value before it becomes unusable.
Some food might go to charities.
Some could be sold at reduced prices.
Some could enter secondary manufacturing.
Some might become animal feed.
Food unsuitable for consumption could move further down the waste hierarchy towards industrial uses, anaerobic digestion or composting.
The objective would be to keep food at its highest possible value for as long as possible.
Technology Cannot Solve Food Poverty
There is an important distinction that should not be lost in the excitement around innovation.
Food waste does not cause food poverty.
A household can struggle to afford food because of low income, housing costs, unemployment, disability, benefit levels or wider economic circumstances. Moving surplus sandwiches around the country does not resolve those structural problems.
Technology should therefore not become an excuse for treating poverty as a logistics failure.
Nor should Britain design a food system in which people experiencing hardship become dependent upon whatever happens to be left over after everybody else has eaten.
The primary objective of food-waste technology should be to make the food system more efficient.
Redistribution can then ensure that unavoidable edible surplus creates social value rather than becoming waste.
Those are related objectives, but they are not the same thing.
The Bigger Picture
Food technology is often associated with alternative proteins, vertical farms and futuristic agriculture.
Some of the largest opportunities may be much less glamorous.
Britain already produces, imports, manufactures, transports, sells and consumes enormous quantities of food.
The challenge is making that existing system considerably more intelligent.
Too Good To Go demonstrated that restaurants could turn end-of-day surplus into discounted inventory. OLIO demonstrated that communities could redistribute unwanted food. Winnow demonstrated that artificial intelligence could help commercial kitchens understand what they were throwing away.
The next generation of companies could connect those ideas across the entire supply chain.
They could predict surplus before it happens, identify it automatically when it does, understand where demand exists and coordinate the physical infrastructure required to move food quickly.
That is where the opportunity becomes particularly interesting.
Britain does not simply have a food-waste problem and a food-insecurity problem. It also has an information, coordination and productivity problem running through the food system.
The next breakthrough in food technology may not be inventing a new food. It may be building the digital infrastructure that ensures far more of the food we already produce actually reaches somebody who can use it.