“With ResQ Club you can easily minimize your waste to zero since the leftovers can be sold just with a few clicks”

Over a hundred grocery stores and hypermarkets in Finland use ResQ Club to sell their leftover food. Stores sell products that are expiring the same day in daily changing surprise bags. The storekeepers of K-Citymarket Iisalmi, Harri and Sarika Piipponen, tell how their store has benefited from the digital way of selling surplus food, and how they have minimized their waste almost to zero with the help of the app.

K-Citymarket Iisalmi

We were the 2nd hypermarket in ResQ Club when we started in February 2019. We had heard that the app is used in many grocery stores and we wanted to test if it would also work in a bigger store. Starting with ResQ was much easier than we thought, and we started selling our leftovers the same day we got the credentials for the service. Also, the number of customers and how quick they are to buy the bags via the app really surprised us. We were the first ResQ partner in our city but anyhow we managed to sell all the bags in less than 10 minutes on the first day. Now we have sold over 200 surprise bags and the sales percentage has been 100%.

“ResQ is a great tool to reduce food waste. With the help of the service you can easily sell all your leftover food as the customers see straight away that you have something on offer. It takes me less than half a minute to publish the offers daily.”

Harri Piipponen, storekeeper, K-Citymarket Iisalmi

Very simple!

ResQ Club can be easily incorporated with other food waste means: we donate most of our leftovers to charity organizations and the food we have left after that, we sell via ResQ. The local customers have been very enthusiastic about this new concept and it’s also very easy to use for our staff members. Evening staff marks the food waste the same way as before and then leaves the leftovers to a storage room, where morning staff mix food assortments to paper bags. We have sold bread bags, meat bags and surprise bags that can have anything inside. It takes me less than half a minute to publish the offers and after that customers come to pick up the food from our service counter.

We started with ResQ because we wanted to test new ways to reduce food waste using digital tools. We have been very content with the whole service. The biggest motivation for us to use the app is to minimize food waste and therefore reduce the environmental impact of food produce, but at the same time it’s been a great way to market our store. Even though ResQ profits are just a small margin of the sales of a hypermarket like us, it’s definitely worth the effort and the profits are significant in a month. I recommend ResQ Club to grocery stores of any size!