Food Future Flashfood Unveils 2025 Impact Report Highlighting a More Abundant Food Future
Flashfood, a leading marketplace for surplus groceries, has released its 2025 Impact Report, The Future of Food Is Abundant, outlining the company’s vision for a food system in which fresh, nutritious food is more affordable, accessible, and consistently available. The report examines how technology can help address food waste while creating economic and social benefits for retailers, shoppers, and communities across North America.
The report comes at a time when the global food system continues to face significant pressures. Weather-related disruptions, geopolitical conflicts, tariffs, inflation, and shifting economic conditions have contributed to volatility throughout the food supply chain. According to Flashfood, these challenges highlight the need to identify practical opportunities that can strengthen food access and make the system more resilient.
One of the most immediate opportunities identified in the report is reducing food waste. Large quantities of fresh food that remain safe and suitable for consumption are routinely removed from grocery store shelves because they are approaching their sell-by dates, have cosmetic imperfections, or simply have not sold quickly enough. Flashfood’s marketplace is designed to give retailers another option by allowing them to offer surplus groceries to consumers at substantial discounts instead of sending those products to landfill.
The company estimates that approximately $35 billion worth of fresh food is wasted at grocery stores in the United States each year. Flashfood argues that recovering even a portion of this surplus can create benefits throughout the food system. Retailers can recover value from products that might otherwise become waste, while consumers gain access to fresh groceries at lower prices.
“Food waste has always been considered an unavoidable cost of the grocery system. We want to make the case that it’s also one of the clearest opportunities to make that system stronger,” said Jordan Schenck, CEO of Flashfood. “When we use technology to recover surplus food, particularly the fresh food that makes up the lion’s share of waste today, retailers recover value, shoppers get more affordable access to fresh groceries and communities become more resilient. That is the abundant food system we are building and we believe it will be the baseline, not the aspiration.”
Measurable Impact in 2025
Flashfood’s 2025 results demonstrate the scale of its marketplace and its role in keeping surplus food in circulation. During the year, the company reported significant progress in diverting food from landfills while helping consumers reduce their grocery expenses.
Among the key figures highlighted in the 2025 Impact Report are:
- 32.9 million pounds of food diverted from landfills
- $85.5 million saved by shoppers on fresh groceries
- 1.6 million Produce Boxes sold
The results reflect Flashfood’s focus on connecting retailers with consumers who are willing to purchase quality surplus food at reduced prices. Rather than treating excess inventory solely as a disposal challenge, the marketplace turns it into an opportunity for retailers and shoppers.
The company’s Produce Box program is another important component of its strategy. By making surplus produce available in bundled formats, Flashfood provides consumers with an affordable way to purchase fruits and vegetables while helping retailers move inventory that might otherwise be discarded.
Technology and Food Insecurity
Beyond its environmental and economic impact, the report highlights emerging research suggesting that surplus-food technology may also contribute to improved food access.
Flashfood points to early research conducted at the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A dissertation examining the role of technology in the food supply chain found evidence of a measurable relationship between Flashfood’s presence and food insecurity rates in the communities it serves.
According to the research cited by Flashfood, the presence of one Flashfood store was associated, on average, with a 0.090 percentage-point reduction in a county-level food insecurity rate. The company estimates that this represents approximately 860 people per county, or roughly 146,000 people across the counties where Flashfood operates.
While the research represents an important early finding rather than a definitive measure of causation, Flashfood says it demonstrates the potential for technology-enabled food recovery to play a broader role in improving food affordability and accessibility.
The findings also reinforce the company’s view that food waste and food insecurity should not be treated as completely separate challenges. Food that is wasted cannot benefit consumers, while making surplus food available at lower prices can potentially provide additional purchasing opportunities for households facing higher grocery costs.
Expanding the Retail Network
Flashfood continued expanding its retail footprint in 2025 through new partnerships with major grocery operators. Among the retailers joining or expanding their participation were Kroger’s Mid-Atlantic Division and Gelson’s Markets in Southern California.
These partnerships represent the continued adoption of digital surplus-food solutions by grocery retailers looking for ways to improve inventory management and reduce waste. By providing a digital marketplace for surplus products, Flashfood enables participating stores to quickly communicate available deals to nearby shoppers.
The approach can also help retailers integrate food recovery into their regular operations rather than relying exclusively on traditional waste-management practices. Faster identification and promotion of surplus inventory can increase the likelihood that products will be purchased while they are still at their best.
Flashfood says it is continuing to invest in technology that makes it easier for grocery stores to identify and post surplus inventory efficiently. Improving these processes could allow retailers to manage more products through the marketplace while reducing the operational burden associated with manually handling surplus items.
Building a More Resilient Food System
The central message of Flashfood’s 2025 Impact Report is that food abundance does not necessarily require producing more food. Instead, the company believes that a more efficient food system can make better use of the food that is already available.
Food waste represents a loss of resources at multiple stages of the supply chain. When food is produced but never consumed, the resources used to grow, transport, refrigerate, package, and sell it are also effectively wasted. Redirecting surplus products to consumers can therefore create environmental and economic value simultaneously.
For grocery retailers, the model offers an opportunity to recover revenue from inventory that might otherwise have little or no remaining commercial value. For consumers, discounted surplus groceries can provide an additional way to manage household food budgets. For communities, greater access to affordable food may contribute to broader food-system resilience.
Flashfood’s 2025 performance suggests that the company is positioning surplus-food recovery as more than a waste-reduction initiative. Its marketplace is increasingly being presented as part of a broader strategy for improving food affordability, reducing environmental impacts, and strengthening the connection between retailers and the communities they serve.
Looking ahead, Flashfood plans to continue expanding its retail network and developing its technology platform. The company believes that making surplus food easier to discover and purchase can help establish food recovery as a routine part of grocery shopping and retail operations.
With millions of pounds of food already diverted from landfills and millions of dollars saved by shoppers, Flashfood’s latest impact report presents food waste reduction as an opportunity to create greater value from existing resources. Its vision of an “abundant” food system is built around the idea that food already produced should have a better chance of reaching consumers—and that technology can help make that possible at scale.
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