Squiseat 2024: Waste Not, Want Not
Alberto Drusiani, Co-Founder & CEO of Squiseat, talks us through this Italian anti-waste app that aims to limit food waste meal by meal.
What inspired you to launch Squiseat?
During my academic studies at the University of Bologna I worked as a waiter, and noticed that many places such as restaurants, bistros, pasta factories, and others often ended up throwing away large amounts of food.
How exactly does Squiseat work?
Squiseat is a platform that allows customers to purchase surplus food at 50% off its listed price through our app. This aims to reduce food waste by making it easy to buy surplus food. This benefits both customers and food suppliers – customers can buy or reserve high quality food at a discounted price, and food suppliers can mitigate the economic losses associated with wasted food.
Squiseat also helps the environment by reducing CO2 atmospheric pollution, and creates a virtuous circle, since food resources are used with greater awareness.
Is food waste a major problem within the food industry?
Food waste is one of the most serious issues within the food industry. Among the sustainability goals of the 2030 UN Agenda, some are closely related to food. For example, Goal 2 is to: “End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture.” Goal 12 is to: “Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns.”
How successful has Squiseat been so far?
We recently launched our service through our app and are mainly active in Bologna. However, we expect to expand to all major Italian cities by the end of 2023. As of today, we’ve served over 1,500 customers and partnered with over 100 food businesses.
Our goal for 2022 is to affiliate at least 500 additional businesses and bring the total number of customers to over 15,000.
Do you work solely with restaurants or with retailers too?
Actually, our primary focus isn’t restaurants, but rather the likes of delicatessens, rotisseries, pizzerias, pastry shops, and bakeries, as these types of businesses usually have a counter inside the store, through which they display their goods to customers.
We’re also looking to launch partnerships with large-scale retail businesses, as supermarkets are also majorly affected by the problem of food waste.
What challenges have you faced during the early stages of the business?
Initially, I think the main challenge has been to establish achievable goals, to correctly identify our target audience, and to define a successful business model. Once we’re a bit more established and have a solid team in place, we’ll hopefully become more well known and will therefore be able to continue to build on our success to date.
Are you hoping to expand abroad?
Indeed. Once we have Squiseat up and running throughout Italy, I believe the next step will be to expand abroad. Food waste is an issue affecting most, if not, all countries in the world.
The estimated amount of food waste each year, in Italy alone, is around €15 billion. According to recent studies, this represents 0.88% of Italy's GDP.
Do you consider yourselves to be trendsetters?
We aspire to become the first Italian anti-waste app, with a strong focus on transparency. There are several other services involved in tackling the problem of food waste, but we have a different approach.
Our aim is to guarantee the quality of the products customers buy and offer the ability to choose specific products. Other services only offer closed-box purchases, thus perpetuating the problem that we are trying to solve, if customers dislike what they’ve bought, or can’t eat it due to specific dietary needs.
