Food Waste Apps

At the beginning of 2025, I submitted and defended my dissertation on mobile apps that promise to reduce food waste. In the near future, I will be looking for channels to make the knowledge I have gained more widely accessible and to publish the work. Until then, all I can do is share the abstract.

Commensal Infrastructures of Decay: The Role of Mobile Apps in Enacting Surplus Food

Reducing food waste is a societal challenge that requires action from many actors from politics, economy, and science. Apps have emerged as a popular measure, and many are frequently used by individuals. This thesis ethnographically examines three food waste apps, Too Good To Go, OLIO, and WasteMentor.

While research often centres on the users of these apps, this work focuses on the actors in the background, including human and non-human actors. The various infrastructures are crucial actors. My research analyses how digital infrastructures relate to existing thematic (food waste reduction) infrastructures and how they are affected when new app infrastructures are added. This dissertation therefore takes Mol’s ‘ontological multiplicity’ as a starting point and explores the role of apps in enacting surplus food to contribute to critical infrastructure studies.

It shows how different realities are enacted in mundane settings. Apps act as ‘deflectors of responsibility’ as they redistribute surplus food. In doing so, the responsibility and effort to use the food is shifted onto the recipient. Through this redistribution, apps enact the ‘matters of potential’ of (market or research) gaps that can be realised through the datafication of food waste and that pays off in several currencies. Data hence plays an essential role since these apps also act as ‘liminal mediators of datafication’ by pointing to the impossibility of measuring food waste. Finally, this thesis identifies apps as ‘creators of visibilities’ as they create awareness for the topic and highlight the lack of digital labour needed for these apps to run smoothly.

By describing the realities around apps, this dissertation reveals the limits of digital platforms in combating food waste. These apps – in all their co-existing versions – act as ‘commensal infrastructures.‘ They are a bundle of new infrastructures that are introduced by app providers and that relate to existing thematic infrastructures, which are shifted, stay largely the same, or are pushed aside. App infrastructures benefit from and depend on relational practices while thematic infrastructures experience costs and benefits that balance each other out without solving the problem of food waste.