On January 28, 2026, FamilyMart announced a partnership with \"Too Good To Go,\" an app with a cumulative food-loss-reduction track record of over 500 million meals worldwide. It launched pilot operation at 6 stores in Tokyo in the Ikebukuro, Komazawa University, and Aoyama areas, succeeding in cutting disposal volume by about 5%. The convenience-store industry has begun facing food loss with digital tools in earnest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Too Good To Go\" is a food-loss-reduction app from Denmark. Through the app, consumers can buy unsold products before closing as a \"surprise bag\" at 50% or more off the list price. The mechanism where you don't know what's inside until you open it caught on as a \"sense of surprise,\" and since the service's launch in 2016 it has spread to over 170,000 stores in 19 countries across Europe, North America, and Asia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this partnership with FamilyMart, on top of selling surprise bags, it combined a method of appealing to consumers by putting \"teary-eyed stickers\" on products nearing their consume-by date. By combining the two approaches, the pilot stores achieved a result of cutting disposal volume by about 5%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
FamilyMart has set targets of cutting food waste 50% by 2030 versus 2018 and 80% by 2050. This app partnership is one move toward that, but the annualized reduction estimate is said to be about 3,000 tons, and it's at a stage where achieving the target requires stacking up further measures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the other hand, the value this effort shows doesn't stop at cost reduction.The foods Gen Z chooses. An era when environmental consideration becomes brand strength<\/a>As we also covered in, younger generations in particular are increasingly placing \"attitude toward the environment\" as an axis of brand evaluation. Delivering food-loss-reduction efforts to consumers in the \"visualized\" form of an app is directly tied to building brand trust as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While convenience-store efforts draw attention, the essential source of food waste isn't only the tail end of distribution.The relationship between off-spec vegetables and food loss<\/a>As we organized in as well, for farm produce, including disposal at the production area (production-area disposal), about 4 million tons a year are discarded without ever reaching the market. This figure is \"invisible disposal\" not included in the official food-loss statistics either.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dry processing functions as an approach to this problem from the manufacturing side. By removing moisture to raise storability, ingredients can be commercialized at the stage before \"unsold\" or \"off-spec\" is generated.What is dried vegetables' method of making? An explanation of the production flow and the ingenuity for \"vegetables unsuited to drying\"<\/a>As introduced in, drying technology is also one means of structurally reducing disposal loss.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Going forward, the more distribution and retail accelerate disposal reduction, the stronger the move to choose \"ingredients and processing methods that don't generate disposal in the first place\" will grow. From \"dealing with disposal after it's generated\" to \"changing the design so it isn't generated\" -- the convenience-store move is prompting a shift in thinking across the entire supply chain.<\/p>\n\n\n\nImplications for the food-manufacturing floor -- the limits of a \"deal with it after it's generated\" mindset<\/h2>\n\n\n\n