Restaurants looking to reduce food waste and hungry Londoners in search of a bargain may both get what they deserve this week, when the app Karma launches in the capital.
The premise is appealingly simple: restaurants, cafes and grocery stores upload details of their surplus food to the Karma app and mark it at a 50% discount; customers searching for food in their area can place an order in-app and collect it to go within a specified time.
It’s a model that has proved successful in Sweden, where co-founders Hjalmar Ståhlberg Nordegren, Ludvig Berling, Mattis Larsson and Elsa Bernadotte launched Karma back in November 2016. In just over a year it has grown its network to the point where it now features some 250,000 unique users and over 1,000 partner restaurants and stores.
Delivering similar growth in London will mean overcoming what is likely to be at least some reluctance on the part of both restaurants and customers. A similar service, Too Good To Go, launched here in 2016 and is hardly a fixture on the capital’s phones.
Timing may be more favourable this time round. The rise of “all day” dining models means Londoners are happier than they used to be to explore dining options at off-peak times; in parallel, high-profile environmental campaigns — like the Evening Standard’s crackdown on plastic straws — are increasingly prevalent, with both operators and consumers more mindful of the impact of their food choices than ever before.
The team behind Karma is also confident that it has a significantly stronger offer than previous entrants, citing an improved user experience and a broader range of restaurants at launch as lures for prospective customers. The roster of partners signed up to date is certainly wide-ranging, encompassing (among others) the Michelin-starred Aquavit, Alan Yau’s pide concept Yamabahce, the vegetarian chain Tibits, detox kitchen Detox Kitchen, various locations from both Aubaine and Hummus Bros, and the modern British Mayfair restaurant Magpie.
As Magpie co-founder James Ramsden notes, Karma offers these businesses something valuable:
“Anything that helps minimise food waste is a huge bonus for restaurants. You can be as diligent as you like but odds are you’re not going to sell exactly what you expected. You’ll get a run on one dish in particular — it’s extraordinary how that can happen on certain days — meaning something else doesn’t shift at all, or — hey, mistakes happen — a chef over-orders something. So it’s good to have a platform whereby excess produce can be used in a sensible and efficient manner. It’s good for the bottom line and at least as importantly, the planet.”
Quite how effectively Karma delivers on this promise remains to be seen. A model that works perfectly well in a relatively small place like Stockholm may struggle to replicate the requisite network effects in a city as sprawling as London; expect (initially at least) to find participating restaurants clustered in smaller areas rather than scattered across town. Expect, too, a fair few operators and Instagram users vocally virtue-signalling about their love for it in search of a virtual greenwash; keep fingers crossed that there’s more to it than that and that Karma does in fact stick around. London’s restaurant food wastage problem, after all, is appalling; anything that can help mitigate (rather than “disrupt”) it is surely worth a little attention, and no little support.