A new store, recently opened in Denmark, is asking consumers an important question: Would you buy food that doesn’t look perfect and may be past its expiration date (but not like crazy past) in order to save money and help cut down on the amount of food that goes to waste for no good reason other than it’s too disfigured to be loved by your eyes (if not your stomach)?
According to Quartz, the new supermarket — called WeFood — aims to not only cut down on the food wasted by Copenhagen (and the country of Denmark in general) but become an important source of affordable nutrition to those citizens who can’t afford food at higher prices elsewhere. Boasting markdowns of up to 50 percent on some items, WeFood is already earning accolades:
The supermarket hopes to draw both environmentally conscious shoppers and low-income individuals with limited budgets, according to Folkekirkens Nodhjaelp, the local non-profit that set up the project over the past year. Already praising the effort — which took a fair amount of legislative wrangling to set up — is Danish food minister Eva Kjer Hansen, who called the amount of food wasted each year “ridiculous.”
Could such markets be successes in America as well? The former CEO of Trader Joe’s is launching something very similar in Massachusetts, and Grocery Outlets — a chain of stores that allows companies to sell overstock and food with outdated packaging — looks promising too. Could buying expired food that’s still good be the next big trend in shopping? It certainly might help families for whom even coupon clipping may still not be enough. And since food waste is one of the biggest ecological issues on people’s minds these days, this movement might kill two birds with one baguette (so to speak).
