SASKATCHEWAN — Every day across Canada, a quiet rescue operation is underway inside grocery stores.
It happens in the produce aisle, behind the meat counter, and in the back rooms where unsold food used to quietly disappear into dumpsters.
Now, thanks to a new generation of Canadian-built grocery apps, that food is being rerouted to dinner tables instead, saving families money and dramatically cutting food waste.
The movement is growing quickly, and in Regina alone the numbers are already staggering.
In 2025, shoppers using the Flashfood app saved $1,141,596 on groceries while preventing 482,418 pounds of food from ending up in landfills.
Across Saskatchewan, the impact was even bigger: $3,264,218 saved and 1,391,598 pounds of food rescued.
Those numbers represent one of the largest community-driven food-waste reductions anywhere in Canada.
And the revolution is just beginning.
A Canadian idea with a global impact
The movement began with a simple realization.
Canada wastes an enormous amount of food.
Every year, roughly 35.5 million tonnes of food is lost or wasted across the country, with an estimated economic cost of more than $49 billion annually.
In fact, experts estimate about 46 per cent of food in Canada never gets eaten.
Most of that food is still perfectly safe, often thrown away because stores have too much inventory or products are approaching their best-before date.
For Toronto entrepreneur Josh Domingues, that waste was impossible to ignore.
In 2016 he founded Flashfood, a digital marketplace designed to solve two problems at once: rising grocery prices and mountains of edible food heading to landfill.
The concept was simple.
Grocers scan products nearing their best-before date and post them on the Flashfood app at steep discounts, often up to 50 per cent off.
Shoppers browse the deals on their phones, pay in the app, and pick the food up in a designated fridge inside the store.
What was once garbage becomes dinner.
From startup to national food rescue network
Flashfood launched in a handful of Quebec grocery stores before expanding nationwide.
Today it operates in more than 900 grocery stores across Canada, including Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, and other Loblaw banners.
The results have been dramatic.
Since 2019 alone, the Flashfood partnership with Loblaw has diverted more than 105 million pounds of food from landfill while helping Canadians save over $238 million on groceries.
In 2025 alone, Canadian shoppers saved $58 million using the app.
Globally, Flashfood users have saved hundreds of millions of dollars and diverted massive quantities of food from waste streams.
For families struggling with food prices, the savings can be immediate and significant.
According to Flashfood’s vice-president of Engineering, Yixin Zhu, many shoppers see their grocery bills drop dramatically.
“On average, shoppers can often cut their cart roughly in half,” Zhu said. “You’re getting fresh food, meat, produce, dairy, but at a much lower cost.”
The app has collectively helped shoppers save more than $400 million while diverting over 160 million pounds of food from landfill.
Saskatchewan’s growing role
While Flashfood operates across North America, Saskatchewan is quietly becoming one of its success stories.
In Regina alone last year:
• 482,418 pounds of food diverted from landfill
• $1.14 million saved by shoppers
Across the province:
• 1.39 million pounds of food rescued
• $3.26 million saved
At one Saskatchewan store, more than 114,000 pounds of food were diverted in a single year.
Those numbers translate into thousands of meals and a measurable environmental impact.
Food waste is one of the largest contributors to methane emissions in landfills.
Reducing it helps cut greenhouse gases while also making better use of the energy, water and labour required to produce food.
A second wave of grocery tech
While Flashfood focuses on rescuing unsold food, a second Canadian innovation is tackling grocery costs from a different angle.
The Gofer Run app, created by Canadian company One Red Maple, acts like a search engine for grocery prices.
President and co-founder Mark Sherry describes it as “Trivago for groceries.”
Instead of checking flyers or visiting multiple store websites, users simply enter a shopping list.
The app then scans nearby grocery stores in real time and calculates where each item is cheapest.
It can even suggest the best combination of stores to maximize savings.
“For a family of four, we’re saving them hundreds of dollars a month,” Sherry said.
On average, the platform can reduce grocery bills by around 25 per cent.
The technology works by analyzing every version of a product across multiple retailers, brands, sizes, and variations, calculating the lowest price per unit.
Artificial intelligence helps identify items accurately and match them across different store websites.
Users can even take a photo of a product in a store and instantly compare prices nearby.
The app also helps reduce food waste in a simpler way by encouraging shoppers to plan ahead.
“Just creating a list before going to the store reduces waste,” Sherry said. “If you shop with a list, you buy what you need.”
Why these apps matter now
The rise of these tools comes at a moment when grocery costs have become one of the most pressing financial concerns for Canadians.
Food prices have surged in recent years due to inflation, supply chain disruptions, and global economic pressures.
At the same time, millions of tonnes of edible food continue to be thrown away.
That combination makes technology-driven solutions increasingly attractive.
Apps like Flashfood and Gofer Run are tackling the problem from both sides.
They reduce food waste and help families afford groceries.
For retailers, the benefits are also significant.
Stores recover revenue from food that would otherwise be discarded while also meeting sustainability goals.
The future of food-saving tech
Experts say this is only the beginning.
Flashfood continues to expand across North America and is adding more retailers every year.
The company’s long-term vision is simple. Any grocery item that might otherwise be wasted should be available for purchase through the platform.
Meanwhile, tools like Gofer Run are pushing grocery transparency even further.
Sherry believes price-comparison technology could transform how Canadians shop.
“We don’t build a lot of consumer apps in Canada,” he said. “But this shows we can build something big here.”
The same technology could eventually compare prices for everything from insurance to household services.
The ripple effect
For now, the impact is already visible in cities like Regina.
Every pound of rescued food represents groceries that did not go to waste.
Every discounted item represents money staying in a household budget.
And every app download strengthens a new kind of economy built not on producing more food, but on wasting less of it.
In a country where nearly half the food supply can go uneaten, that small shift could change everything.
Because sometimes the most powerful innovations are not about creating something new.
They are about making sure what already exists finally gets used.
