As a student or young professional living alone, have you ever had to throw away a packet of bread after eating barely half of it? With the convenience of sliced bread also comes a problem – food waste due to bread going moldy quickly. It’s a problem that Prashant Baid knows all too well.
"I love bread but I can't be eating 20 slices in 3 days," he explained in an email to NPR.
"Bread has such a short shelf life and I don't want to waste food, so it makes more sense to buy bread in smaller quantities. Sure you can freeze 'em, but it doesn't taste as good as fresh bread," he added.
Baid decided to do something about the issue – he started a website that helps people find half loaves of bread in their cities.
The website, called halfloafnear.me, uses Dunzo as data source to find half loaves of bread for people who like the food item but hate food waste.
“This website is of course a non-useful, silly little thing. But I hope that it can get people to start thinking about why more stores don't sell half loaves when it seems like a more practical thing to do,” says Baid.
The website is currently operational only in the Indian cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Gurgaon and Pune, and that led to a surprising revelation.
When Baid launched halfloafnear.me, the site received more than 16,000 hits. Much to his surprise, most of the clicks came from the US, where, Baid says, people seem “annoyed that the stores there also have very limited availability of half-loaves of bread.” The site has received more comments from Americans than anyone else, he says.
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