Responsible shopping mobile app Bonapp.eco reveals the first aggregated consumer behavior data about Romanian shoppers who are conscious about food waste. The data were released by the company to mark the International Day of Awareness of Food Loss and Waste (29 September), highlighting the rapid increase in responsible shopping among the urban population, who is turning to buying food, sweets, and drinks that are either perishable or nearing the expiry date, and which otherwise would have simply been discarded. The two main factors driving the purchase decision for this population segment are avoiding food waste (online, “rescuing” is the preferred term) as well as the discounts offered by the merchants enrolled in the app.

Food waste is not only a material loss for the merchant or producer, but also a loss of opportunity (because it translates into a missed exchange of value), as well as an environmental risk, since food discarded into landfills decomposes and generates large amounts of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

Bonapp.eco lists the offerings of partner stores for the users, who can choose and then order their products directly from the application, paying online and picking their order directly from the store. Orders are fulfilled on a “first come, first served” basis, while stocks last.

Over the past 10 months since the app’s rollout, Bonapp.eco users have rescued about 7.5 tons of food, representing a reduction in carbon emissions of more than 15 tons of CO2, the equivalent of what a diesel-powered car would emit going around the Earth two times through the Equator.

Bonapp.eco currently has nearly 500 partner merchants in the cities of Cluj-Napoca and Bucharest, and the company is in talks with several chain stores and HoReCa establishments to further expand its client base. Stores design their offerings as they like, usually in the form of packages containing one or more products, and sometimes as a “surprise box” for those customers that like to try new things. The vast majority of available packages, about 95 percent of total, go for a discount of 50 percent, with the rest giving discounts between 70 percent and 90 percent.

“We were pleasantly surprised by the rapid adoption pace of our app”, says Sinziana Pertea, Partner & Customer Success Senior Specialist. “Tracing the dynamics of orders over the last 10 months, we found out that once users tried the Bonapp.eco app they quickly turned into loyal customers. We’ve seen many cases of users who went from two or three orders in the first month of using the app to more than 10 in the next month, then to 20-30 in next month after that. Usually, the Bonapp.eco solution is quickly adopted and subsequently becomes commonly used. We also have «champion» users , with over 400 packages rescued, in more than 250 orders, over the last 10 months. As far as I’ve noticed, users generally become loyal customers of merchants whose offerings they follow on a daily basis. For some stores, Bonapp.eco is also a way to offload perishable inventory at the end of the day. One of our partners, for instance, sold 19 discounted product packages in a single day, in less than two and a half minutes.”