It’s common for consumers to buy more food than they need and throw it away because they forget or the food has expired. It is estimated that 1.3 billion tons of food items are wasted annually, a loss of approximately $1 trillion.
Recelery, a pantry tracking app and online marketplace, aims to reduce food waste with a variety of features. Users can record their recent food purchases, manage grocery lists, view “virtual pantries” from other users in their area, and even sell unused grocery items to neighbors. Users can invite friends and family to share what food is in their virtual pantries.
The startup hopes the app will help consumers keep track of when food in their kitchen/pantry is running low and help them know what food they can buy from neighbors between grocery trips. Additionally, in times of high inflation, the marketplace tool can provide everyday consumers with a way to cash in on recently purchased foods that might otherwise end up in the trash.
Recelery’s public marketplace allows anyone within a mile of your neighborhood to sell and buy unused grocery items. When you upload an item to the app, sellers note when the food item expires, where it was originally purchased, where to pick it up, and how much to sell it for.
Over the weekend, Recelery made improvements to the app’s marketplace features, such as expanding the limit of images users can post, new markers to show the date an item was added, and users can now sell up to 25 items. At one time.
Before the reboot, sellers could only upload one image of a food item, and it wasn’t clear to buyers when a food was first uploaded for sale. Now, sellers can add as many pictures as they want, and buyers can see how long the food item is available. Also, with the update, completed sales will be removed from the marketplace.
So far, Recelery does not take a fee from the transaction, so the seller gets 100% of the sale.
Also, this may be obvious to some, but Recelery users are not allowed to sell homemade food products, pre-opened items, perishable foods, or food items. Users are not allowed to sell perishable food, baby food and baby milk party trays.
Founder Daniel Abrams advises consumers to use “reasonable judgment” when buying from people they meet online. “You have the right to request images and communicate with the seller via text message before completing the transaction,” Abrams told TechCrunch.
Recelery is free to use and available for download worldwide on the App Store and Google Play Store.
There is a subscription option where users can spend $2.99 per month or $16.99 per year. With the subscription, users can add 60+ items to their pantry, 60+ items to their grocery list, 25+ items to the marketplace, and access to an unlimited number of pantries created by other community members.
Resale was launched in June 2021 and is fully funded by Abrams, who first came up with the idea five years ago when he was a law student.
“I realized I was throwing away a lot of produce and I went to see if there was anything I could sell food for or see what kind of food my neighbors had,” Abrams said. However, Abrams was unable to find an app that met his exact needs. So, he decided to create one.
The company says Reseller is “the first app of its kind.” On average, the app has over 1,000 monthly users.
