EatMe

Eat me App

Eat me App

Rudolf Ahn lived outside of Russia, traveling between Austria, Switzerland, Great Britain and Japan, but at the age of 23, in 2007, he returned to St. Petersburg, where he began to re-learn not only the language, but also the Russian lifestyle. "One of the most striking contrasts for me was that no one in Russia sorts garbage, although this is an ordinary practice in the world," Ahn recalled in an interview with Forbes. —And I wanted to create an eco-friendly startup at the intersection of sociality and business." The entrepreneur's interest fell on projects related to the disposal of food. According to the ReFed project, $220 billion is spent every year in the United States on growing, processing, transporting and disposing of food that no one eats. About a third of all food produced in the world will never be used — these data are published in UN reports. Following the example of the Danish company Too Good to Go, An decided to develop a service that allows you to buy food at a discount in restaurants, which will soon be written off. "You can't sell such dishes tomorrow, but today they are quite fresh," says Ahn.

Having invested 15 million rubles in the idea, the entrepreneur developed a service website, an application, hired employees, began investing in advertising and launched EatMe in March last year in St. Petersburg. Today, the Ana startup operates in 8 cities, including Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Sochi and Khabarovsk, and cooperates with more than 460 establishments (including chain companies like Lunch Buffet, Sinnabon, Shokoladnitsa, Vkusville), ready to sell extra food through the EatMe service and share the proceeds with An.

In Russia, where, according to the Tiar Center, 17 million tons of food are thrown into landfills every year, food waste projects are still a rarity. According to Ahn, in the near future, the market segment in which his startup operates should not show significant growth and competition: it's about large financial investments and labor costs when dealing with restaurants. But in three years, EatMe plans to reach payback and attract the attention of the giants of the food tech market - Yandex or Mail.ru Group. "I was glad to cooperate with them," explains Ahn, "But the project is more important to me than investment and profit. Our main task is to solve the problem of food waste in catering and retail."