TORONTO – When Gillian Pulfer picked up roasted sweet potato soup, flank steak and chicken salad from a Toronto Pusateri’s Fine Foods for $10 last weekend, the deal was too good not to brag about.
“It’s a more high-end, luxury grocery store…so most people don’t necessarily have the budget to go shop there, but you’re saving money and you’re getting good food,” said Pulfer.
After chowing down, she let her Instagram followers in on her secret: She found the haul on Too Good to Go. The app is one of many uniting deal-seekers with restaurants and grocers eager to keep aging food that’s still fit for consumption out of the trash in exchange for a small fee.
Users of apps like Too Good To Go, Flashfood, Feedback and Olio say they have paid anywhere from $3 to $10 for prepared lunches or dinners, a week’s worth of vegetables and fruit, several loaves of bread, pastry boxes and even, entire pizzas or cakes.
The savings often go a long way, said Eric Tribe, Flashfood’s chief marketplace officer.
“Over the holidays, we had a father who wrote in and thanked us because he’d been let go from his job due to COVID-19 and he used the money saved on Flashfood to buy stocking stuffers for his kids,” said Tribe.
The app, which is used by supermarket conglomerate Loblaw Corp., was started by Toronto entrepreneur Josh Domingues in 2016, after his chef sister threw out $4,000 of food following a catered event.
The app offers produce, meat, fish, bread, dairy and pantry staples nearing their best before date and often marked down by at least 50 per cent. Some items last for weeks, if frozen or cooked. Others have a day or two left.
Orders are retrieved in supermarkets, which typically mark items nearing their best before dates down or donate them to charities, food banks and farms for animal feed.
But those methods still leave grocers responsible for a quarter of the country’s food waste, so Flashfood targeted that portion exclusively, said Tribe. (The app does not divert food from charities, he added.)
To date, Flashfood has kept more than 13.5 million kilograms of food out of landfills and saved users a collective $90 million.
However, Second Harvest, a charity redistributing unsold items to people in need, estimates that almost 60 per cent or 35.5 million tonnes of food produced in Canada is wasted annually. About 32 per cent or 11.2 million tonnes of that lost food is edible and could be redirected to people in need.
“Some people claim this food waste can be solved by downloading an app,” said Maria Corradini, the Arrell Chair in Food Quality at the University of Guelph.
“That’s probably not true, but of course they can have a contribution to reducing this burden.”
She believes better inventory planning and use of artificial intelligence would go even further to addressing food waste.
Too Good To Go’s country manager for Canada agrees inventory management is key, but said, “matching supply and demand is very complex” and no restaurant wants to produce less only to find it can’t serve late customers.
Too Good To Go mostly deals with restaurants, bakeries, and butchers, but also partners with grocery and convenience stores.
Users of the app, which was founded in Copenhagen in 2016 and expanded to Canada last July, order ahead before fetching items at designated times.
What they pick up is a mystery because businesses sell “surprise bags,” and while some offer hints about their contents, others don’t.
For example, Italian food purveyor Eataly advertises some $8 bags as having charcuterie ingredients, but McEwan Foods, celebrity chef Mark McEwan’s supermarket, shares no clues about its $8 bags.
Toronto bakery Daan Go Cake Lab’s bags have featured cake slices or its famous character macarons. Some simply weren’t sold that day, but others have cracks or blemishes the bakery’s posh clientele wouldn’t accept.
Signing up for Too Good To Go was a no-brainer, said chief operating officer James Canedo.
“As chefs, you never want to see food wasted. It’s almost sacred for us,” he said.
“So many people out there don’t have the same privileges, so for food to be wasted, that is something we’re trying to prevent.”
Corradini lauds those sentiments and said the apps’ waste reduction goals are noble, but there are risks.
While some apps only deal with reputable vendors staffed with employees trained in handling food, others like Olio allow anyone to prepare food at home or sell items they can’t finish.
“I would never go for something that has been opened because you never know what went on there,” Corradini said.
She added that even food from grocers and restaurants should be examined closely before eating and customers should cook, freeze, prepare or consume anything they buy that is due to go off soon very quickly.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 23, 2022.
TOKYO (AP) — Japanese technology group SoftBank swung back to profitability in the July-September quarter, boosted by positive results in its Vision Fund investments.
Tokyo-based SoftBank Group Corp. reported Tuesday a fiscal second quarter profit of nearly 1.18 trillion yen ($7.7 billion), compared with a 931 billion yen loss in the year-earlier period.
Quarterly sales edged up about 6% to nearly 1.77 trillion yen ($11.5 billion).
SoftBank credited income from royalties and licensing related to its holdings in Arm, a computer chip-designing company, whose business spans smartphones, data centers, networking equipment, automotive, consumer electronic devices, and AI applications.
The results were also helped by the absence of losses related to SoftBank’s investment in office-space sharing venture WeWork, which hit the previous fiscal year.
WeWork, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2023, emerged from Chapter 11 in June.
SoftBank has benefitted in recent months from rising share prices in some investment, such as U.S.-based e-commerce company Coupang, Chinese mobility provider DiDi Global and Bytedance, the Chinese developer of TikTok.
SoftBank’s financial results tend to swing wildly, partly because of its sprawling investment portfolio that includes search engine Yahoo, Chinese retailer Alibaba, and artificial intelligence company Nvidia.
SoftBank makes investments in a variety of companies that it groups together in a series of Vision Funds.
The company’s founder, Masayoshi Son, is a pioneer in technology investment in Japan. SoftBank Group does not give earnings forecasts.
Shopify Inc. executives brushed off concerns that incoming U.S. President Donald Trump will be a major detriment to many of the company’s merchants.
“There’s nothing in what we’ve heard from Trump, nor would there have been anything from (Democratic candidate) Kamala (Harris), which we think impacts the overall state of new business formation and entrepreneurship,” Shopify’s chief financial officer Jeff Hoffmeister told analysts on a call Tuesday.
“We still feel really good about all the merchants out there, all the entrepreneurs that want to start new businesses and that’s obviously not going to change with the administration.”
Hoffmeister’s comments come a week after Trump, a Republican businessman, trounced Harris in an election that will soon return him to the Oval Office.
On the campaign trail, he threatened to impose tariffs of 60 per cent on imports from China and roughly 10 per cent to 20 per cent on goods from all other countries.
If the president-elect makes good on the promise, many worry the cost of operating will soar for companies, including customers of Shopify, which sells e-commerce software to small businesses but also brands as big as Kylie Cosmetics and Victoria’s Secret.
These merchants may feel they have no choice but to pass on the increases to customers, perhaps sparking more inflation.
If Trump’s tariffs do come to fruition, Shopify’s president Harley Finkelstein pointed out China is “not a huge area” for Shopify.
However, “we can’t anticipate what every presidential administration is going to do,” he cautioned.
He likened the uncertainty facing the business community to the COVID-19 pandemic where Shopify had to help companies migrate online.
“Our job is no matter what comes the way of our merchants, we provide them with tools and service and support for them to navigate it really well,” he said.
Finkelstein was questioned about the forthcoming U.S. leadership change on a call meant to delve into Shopify’s latest earnings, which sent shares soaring 27 per cent to $158.63 shortly after Tuesday’s market open.
The Ottawa-based company, which keeps its books in U.S. dollars, reported US$828 million in net income for its third quarter, up from US$718 million in the same quarter last year, as its revenue rose 26 per cent.
Revenue for the period ended Sept. 30 totalled US$2.16 billion, up from US$1.71 billion a year earlier.
Subscription solutions revenue reached US$610 million, up from US$486 million in the same quarter last year.
Merchant solutions revenue amounted to US$1.55 billion, up from US$1.23 billion.
Shopify’s net income excluding the impact of equity investments totalled US$344 million for the quarter, up from US$173 million in the same quarter last year.
Daniel Chan, a TD Cowen analyst, said the results show Shopify has a leadership position in the e-commerce world and “a continued ability to gain market share.”
In its outlook for its fourth quarter of 2024, the company said it expects revenue to grow at a mid-to-high-twenties percentage rate on a year-over-year basis.
“Q4 guidance suggests Shopify will finish the year strong, with better-than-expected revenue growth and operating margin,” Chan pointed out in a note to investors.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
TORONTO – RioCan Real Estate Investment Trust says it has cut almost 10 per cent of its staff as it deals with a slowdown in the condo market and overall pushes for greater efficiency.
The company says the cuts, which amount to around 60 employees based on its last annual filing, will mean about $9 million in restructuring charges and should translate to about $8 million in annualized cash savings.
The job cuts come as RioCan and others scale back condo development plans as the market softens, but chief executive Jonathan Gitlin says the reductions were from a companywide efficiency effort.
RioCan says it doesn’t plan to start any new construction of mixed-use properties this year and well into 2025 as it adjusts to the shifting market demand.
The company reported a net income of $96.9 million in the third quarter, up from a loss of $73.5 million last year, as it saw a $159 million boost from a favourable change in the fair value of investment properties.
RioCan reported what it says is a record-breaking 97.8 per cent occupancy rate in the quarter including retail committed occupancy of 98.6 per cent.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 12, 2024.
