SpareEat: Getting surprise bags from Israeli restaurants to fight food waste

Have you ever gone to a restaurant, café, or bakery close to the end of the business day and noticed that there is still so much food left?

As you might think, some of that food gets stored away and sold the next day, but plenty of it, unfortunately, ends up wasted. 

Indeed, food waste is a major problem in Israel. According to a Food Waste and Rescue Report published in early 2024 by Leket Israel, the Environmental Protection Ministry and the Health Ministry, Israel accumulated a staggering 2.6 million tons of food waste in 2022. 

To put it in other terms, that’s well over a third of all food procured in Israel going to waste, meaning NIS 21.3 billion worth of food essentially going down the drain. 

This food could be serving all sorts of purposes, such as helping those in need and supporting businesses that, essentially, have to watch their stock expire. 

That is where SpareEat comes in. 

As explained by the company’s co-founder Jonathan Fischer Toubol, this Israeli smartphone app has a double goal: to fight against food waste, and to combat the high cost of living in Israel. It does this by essentially “rescuing” unsold food from various retailers, and packaging them in “surprise bundles” for the app’s users to pick up. 

Here’s how it works

The Tel Aviv-based company partners with food retailers all over the country, ranging from bakeries and cafés to restaurants and delis. These locations are then listed on the app, with the selection tailored to the user’s location. 

SpareEat connects its users with these businesses so that they can purchase the bundles at lower prices, with the company taking a small commission from the sale. 

On the app, users can see how many bundles are left in each store, how much they cost (prices can range from NIS 25 to NIS 40 per bundle), what time the particular business closes, and how far away it is. This last part is significant, as SpareEat does not deliver. But as Toubol explained, this limitation has its benefits.

“It’s very important to us to make sure that people go back to the small businesses,” he told the Magazine. “We live in a time where everything is being done via delivery, with Wolt and other apps. The result is that people aren’t going into stores anymore, which is harming the businesses. So it’s important for us to try to help the stores get their customers back physically.”

The other limitation of the app is the surprise factor, but this has also become one of the things that make SpareEat stand out, differentiating it from other food-saving apps that exist around the world.

“We call them ‘surprise bags’ because the customers do not know exactly what they are going to get. And the reason is that the stores themselves don’t know what will remain at the end of the day. It’s a surprise for customers and for the stores because they will only see what’s been left behind at the end of the day,” he said.

However, as Toubol noted, the businesses always have a rough idea of the quantities of food that will be left at the end of the day. Even if they don’t know what the specific food items will be, there will always be something available. 

“There is a general explanation in the app about what the stores have, so you can get a general idea about what the surprise bag could contain, and you’re always going to get at least twice the value you paid for. You just don’t know exactly what you’re going to get.”

How it began

SpareEat was founded by three entrepreneurs. They had wanted to start a profitable business, but one that had a deeper meaning to it and could do good in the world. Toubol came from the hi-tech sector, and his co-founder, Laetitia Jessner, from retail. Their third partner, no longer with the company, had a background in the restaurant industry. 

SpareEat would essentially combine the skills of these three entrepreneurs. But they also had to contend with Israel’s infamously high cost of living.

“I’ve lived in Israel for many years, and year after year we think we reach the limit of how high the cost of living can go, and then the next year you find that it’s gone up even more,” explained Toubol, an oleh from France, “so we had to take that into account.”

SpareEat launched in 2019 and originally served only the Tel Aviv area. However, it ended up shutting down in 2020 due to COVID-19 lockdown regulations. 

Three years later, it relaunched, becoming bigger than ever. 

How it’s going 

At the time of writing, SpareEat has expanded to major cities all over the country, ranging from the Gush Dan region to Haifa, Jerusalem, Beersheba, and beyond. 

Just a year since its reopening, the app now works with around 370 businesses and is looking to expand even further. According to Toubol, it services around 250,000 registered users, and this high count has helped SpareEat’s growth even more.

“The first businesses were the most difficult part because when we started a year ago, we didn’t even have an app yet, and we had to convince the very first partners to join up with us,” Toubol said. “But when you have an app that’s already working and is getting more well known, it’s much easier to onboard new businesses.”

He credits a lot of the early success to Jessner’s efforts. 

“She was working in the streets in the heat 12 hours a day, going into all the different stores in Tel Aviv and talking about this crazy idea that we were developing,” he recalled. “Sweating a lot and working a lot. That’s the way we onboarded our first 40 partners. Then we started the app itself in June 2023.”

Now businesses are actively reaching out to them to partner up, without SpareEat having to solicit new partners. 

Another part of their growth has to do with their users themselves making requests. 

“One of the things that is very important for us with SpareEat is that the way we see it, it’s not just another food app because we try to give it some meaning. It has the goal of decreasing food waste and the cost of living. And we see that we are starting to build a kind of community of people for whom these issues matter,” Toubol explained. 

“Many of our users tell us that although we’re doing something small, it feels like we’re touching on something bigger. And that’s super cool because, think about it, you don’t get Wolt customers who go to restaurants asking: ‘Don’t you want to join Wolt? It would be so great to join Wolt, do you want me to help you join Wolt?’ That’s not going to happen. But we have more and more of our users saying, ‘Okay, I don’t have enough places close to my home or university, so what can I do to help you? Because I want you to have locations closer to me.’” 

This has led to customers sometimes suggesting potential partners themselves, helping set up connections on their own initiatives, and putting them in contact with SpareEat, helping add more partners to the service.

The app allows users to filter out various food options. Users can specify if they want pastries or deli food, and they can also toggle options for kosher-only or vegan-only food. However, they are also limited by the quantity of certain types of food retailers. 

For example, there is no option to filter for only gluten-free food. The reason is that there aren’t enough businesses that are exclusively gluten-free, and while plenty of their partner businesses have gluten-free food options, they can’t guarantee that those specifically will be left behind at the end of the day. 

Another interesting aspect of the business is its website. While the app’s language is based on what one’s phone is set to, the company’s website is only in English, despite it being an Israeli company.

The reason they made an English website and not a Hebrew one comes down to reaching a wider range of customers and making do with a small budget. 

“When we started the business, we were so limited in terms of budget and everything, and the idea of starting a website was really just to have only one landing page to try and communicate with everyone,” Toubol said. “We did it in English because we felt that we only had the means to make one language, and everybody needs to read and speak some English, but not everyone knows Hebrew. So the rationale was that if we were making it in English, it would be the most accessible [language] for everyone in Israel.”

The company does have plans to eventually translate its website into Hebrew, but this is far from their top priority, since the real product is the app and not the website itself.

How it’s coping

However, like many companies, SpareEat has also been heavily impacted by the Israel-Hamas war. 

“When the war started, business stopped for about a month,” Toubol said. “After that, it’s been difficult to get back to what it was before.”

SpareEat first had to cope with staffing issues, as many of their salespeople, who should have been going to new places onboarding new partners, were called up to IDF reserve duty. Many of their partner businesses were in the same boat, which only made business harder. They also struggled with expanding into regions impacted by the war, cutting short their plans to bring SpareEat to Ashkelon, for example.

And yet, they have also been using their business to help out soldiers during the war. 

“We added a feature to the app to directly make donations to soldiers,” Toubol said. “With that, we raised funds which we used to buy equipment for the soldiers or prepare hundreds of Shabbat meals for soldiers in Gaza. We also managed to buy 200 kg. of chocolate, Bamba, and all the things soldiers said they were missing while in Gaza.”

The company also made use of its network of partners to aid in these donations.

“For example, we partnered with Doctor Soup, a business in Tel Aviv that makes soup. They decided to prepare a ton of soup for soldiers, but they were lacking fruits and vegetables,” Toubol said. 

“We reached out to our partners that sell fruits and vegetables, and they donated some of their products for the soup. We really try to see how we can leverage the app, users, and our network to help in the war effort, and it has been really amazing. 

“We can say a lot of things about Israelis generally speaking, but they are the most helpful and caring people on Earth.” 

Supermarkets and food waste

The biggest challenge SpareEat now faces is trying to work with supermarkets. 

Supermarkets naturally have so many products that are close to expiring at any given time, so why wouldn’t they use an app like SpareEat to save the food and save money? While this may come as a surprise to many, it turns out that it is for a very good reason. 

“The food suppliers buy all the unsold expired products back from the supermarkets,” Toubol explained, noting that the food all just ends up getting thrown away. This is one of the reasons Israel has so much food waste, and why food prices are often so high. 

“The supermarkets have no incentive or pressure to sell these products or to lower the prices because they know that if they don’t sell them, they are going to have the price refunded,” Toubol noted. “It’s totally insane. It used to be like this in France as well, but they started making laws against it.”

This is something some lawmakers in Israel have been working on too, with Toubol specifically citing MK Yasmin Fridman of Yesh Atid. However, until then, this system will remain in place, continuing to contribute to food waste.

“The supermarkets have no interest in using something like SpareEat because if they do, they will have to sell at 50%, and a fee will have to go to us,” he explained. “What will be left is going to be less than what the suppliers will end up refunding.

“In most places in Europe, they have similar apps and work well with supermarkets, but here in Israel, they get their money back, so why should they bother to do something that causes them to make less money?”