When a store has a buy-one-get-one-free deal, it would be nice to have an app that would match me up with somebody else in the store who also wants only one of that thing; then one of us could buy them and we could split the cost. I can't be the only one who doesn't have room in the freezer for a second bone-in pork roast.

The grocery store near me has a food bank donation that you can put items in before you exit.

I've been thinking it would be a win-win-win situation if I had the choice to donate the other half as money instead of as an item: I get one item cheaper, someone gets a useful, extra donation from me, and the store gets to sell the other item again.

It's only a win for the store if they would sell out of the product if you purchased two, as they would only make the profit off of selling one item to you rather than two. That's why those food bank donations annoy me, they supermarket effectively takes a cut of all the donations.

Not completely true!

For emergency preparedness, I keep a few hundred cans of food around. I live in a rural area, and this is prudent.

I never eat them all best-before, and as this is canned food, best-before is not an expiry/safety date, even remotely.

It is a flavour date.

So I donate my stuff, before purchasing new. And before anyone gets all weird about it, I eat from the same stock I donate, even the day of donation.

This means people get good quality food, I get to renew my stocks, and the grocery store with the donation bin, may or may not have been where I bought the food.

If more people did this, we'd all be better able to handle disasters, and those in need would be better fed. A real win-win.

I have had all three possible experiences with food banks (used them, volunteered at them, employee of one) and I would be really surprised if that gets used, or benefits the food bank if it does.

Food banks have grocery store-like buying power and relationships with wholesalers and local producers, and in my experience nearly all of the food they distribute comes from those sources.

The can drives around the holidays are mostly just for awareness. At the ones I worked at checking, sorting and packing those was very costly in labor both paid and volunteered.

We always accepted direct food donations because americans are super fucking weird about donating money to the immiserated, but will also get very mad if you turn away their useless donations. Which is bad for PR, so against the goals of the org. We always accepted them but "how can we not" was a constant question.

Some charities spend lots of money on things other than their main mission. Whereas if food is donated, you can be quite sure that isn't funding a yacht for the CEO.

Have you talked to the food bank about their policy on past-date canned food? I know at least one food bank where they told people not to donate any food past the date as it will get tossed (plus additional staff and volunteer labor to sort through the stuff). I assume this is common for liability reasons at least.

Some cans have a long time until expiration date, like 3 years. If the GP keeps the cans for 2.5 years and then donate them when they still have 6 month left until the expiration date, is that enough time for the food bank to use them?

When I volunteered at my local food bank turnaround was relatively quick. I remember sorting through paper-covered cans just three weeks after we collected the Canstructure donations to the food pantry centers. However, I don't know how soon they were handed out to people; probably pretty quickly (<1 week) because there wasn't much stock in the building.

It probably depends on location and population.

Most food banks in the U.S. use tolerances that go months beyond the dates on packaged and canned foods and also take into account the integrity of the cans/packages. Fresh prepared foods like bakery items are repackaged for quick redistribution. Fruits/veggies (which are a very small portion of what food banks get) are distributed according to their condition but otherwise spoil the same there as anywhere else. And larger foodbank systems distribute things to the agencies - where people who need food actually go - using these guidelines and sometimes have the same food storage methods as grocery distribution centers might. Liability is a concern, but more in the sense of distributing healthy, useful food vs lawsuits.

Sounds like someone at the "at least one food bank" doesn't understand that there literally is no liability for past-date canned food. I am pretty sure dates on canned food wasn't a thing when I was growing up. It's just another way of prodding the customer to consume.

> It's just another way of prodding the customer to consume.

Not really; expiration dates are printed on food (including canned food) because customers want them. Manufacturers are responding to, not attempting to drive, customer demand.

Not sure that's true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1rZAT2GtmI

That video doesn't even address the question. It says, correctly, that the dates have no particular meaning and are generally unregulated. It doesn't say why they're there.

Hah okay: thats a fair point and I googled this just for you - and for future me.

Marks & Spencer introduced them in 1970 in the UK (1) It's true there was a survey of consumers and folks favored them, but I will refrain from posting the enduring veracity and reflectiveness of a survey and point out that consumers likely wanted dates that meant something

They are often meaningless and we can assume the consumer wasn't in love with dates that are more complex than not.

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sell-and-best-date...

Don't free too bad. Grocery store margins are atrocious.

Yeaaaaah, but do you really want to put a bone-in pork roast in the donation bin? Sounds unsanitary.

Some stores allow for buy one get one as buy one for 1/2 off. Some stores don’t. They make you buy both to get the deal

I remember that after I moved house I needed to buy 5 new energy saving light bulbs. The store near me had an offer:

> £1 each or 4 for £5

I checked with the floor manager if that was accurate and how could I buy 5. Turns out I had to do it in two different transactions.

Moral of this story is: store promotions often don't make much sense.

In most of the US that’d be illegal (unless the four pack was itself a separate product instead of four individual ones). And “two for $5” and “buy one at $5 get one free” are considered different - the first almost always has to work out to $2.50 each unless they get very explicit with a “save $1 when you buy two” wording. Most stores don’t bother.

It varies state-to-state. Texas allows "2-for-$2" and "1-for-$1.50" in the same store at the same time.

This is pretty common in Idaho too, 2 for $2.22 or a single for $1.79 is the 20oz soda deal in just about every convenience store.

Whoa, 2 for $2.22 is something I haven't seen for 15 years here in northern WV. Usually like 2.19 for one, and two is pushing $3.75 now (maybe $3.50 if you're a rewards member).

I suppose we have excise taxes to thank for that.

They do seem quite at liberty to put signs that say 2/3.50 and then have the individual price listed higher beside it.

Yeah, the key is they have to be explicit about both prices ($1.79 for one) - if they just say 2 for $2.22 they have to sell one for $1.11.

That's the opposite of GP's example - it was higher cost to buy 4 together than 4 individually.

> In most of the US that’d be illegal (unless the four pack was itself a separate product instead of four individual ones).

Really? Because KFC does this all the time with a la carte biscuits. The per-item rate is higher if you buy four (as advertised on the menu) than if you were to buy one four times in a row.

If it's part of some combo it can fly, but if it's literally "order 4 and get charged more than ordering 1 four times" you can probably report them to the Commerce Department.

Did you decide to pay £5 or £6?

I was just talking with a friend in China who told me that the item sizes at Costco are too large (yes, obviously).

The solution is apparently to organize WeChat groups around buying -- and subsequently dividing -- the oversized items.

You're not alone. I like the occasional soda, but the sales are always "buy 2 get 2 free".

I don't need 4 cases of soda, but I'd take a BOGO if I could split the deal with someone.

Food sharing in general should be encouraged (as a fickle single man I end up throwing away a lot of food, after e.g. opening a jar of tomato sauce and consuming half of it and leaving the other half in the fridge to use "soon"), but that's odd if it only looks in stores.

I must be more fickle than you. There's no way I would trust a half jar of tomato sauce that I found on Craigslist.

I'm going to make billions providing an escrow service for food splitting where I guarantee the provenance of items like this. I'll make sure to find a use for blockchain so I can really up my profits.

Don't sell the food; sell an NFT of the food. That'll -really- up your profits. Plus, NFTs never spoil!...until you add that feature. Once you have spoiling half cans of tomato sauce in the metaverse you'll be rich!

NFTs with expiration dates! Thanks for making me a billionaire.

You joke, but that's exactly what domain names are.

Domain names come from central authorities. Transfers are reported to the registrar.

Regardless, they are non-fungible tokens with expiration date.

But if you really want to be extra pedantic: the Ethereum Name System is a domain system running on the blockchain, and each domain is a NFT with an expiration date.

Tomato sauce, wine, soups, and other liquid foodstuffs are excellent contenders for ice cube trays. A housemate in university introduced me to 'red wine cubes' from the freezer for chucking into beef Ragu and it turned my world right side up. We now have bags of all sorts in our freezer.

The ice cube trays trick also changed my life after my sister showed me. I even ended buying different sizes of molds to use depending on what I'm freezing.

During the lockdowns I also started with some more traditional preservation techniques like oils and vinegars. Not for long term storage (not enough space) but just for a couple days or weeks at a time. E.g. buying a bag of average quality olives then chuck them in a jar with good olive oil, fresh herbs, garlic, optionally things like chili and an orange rind. Yields both great olives as well as flavored oil for dressings.

Coffee cubes are life-changing if you've ever picked up the East coast iced coffee habit...

I bet white wine cubes go great in a glass of white wine too!

I wouldn't consider myself a wine snob, but I'm not really looking forward to being served a nice Pinot Grigio from Trentino (DOC) with cubes of frozen Liebfraumilch. The logistics of keeping matching iced versions of wine sound overwhelmingly complex.

If you only buy one type of white wine, boom solved.

The only problem in this scenario is being the type of person who always drinks the same wine.

In fairness, you'd be the type of person who always drinks the same white wine at a time. Presumably every 4 or so bottles you would run out of ice cubes and could switch. You also could have a variety of red wines available.

Before covid, I used to bake a batch of three baguettes probably 3x/week, bringing them to work to share. I also brought in growlers of homebrew to share after work. People asked me if, on account of being at home the last two years, I'd been doing a lot more of it. In fact, I've baked and brewed significantly less in that time, and I miss both the sharing and the social time that came about because of those things.

I am also fickle with my food, and a vegan to boot. I solved this problem of leftovers for my situation by making soup. With leftovers, like your tomato sauce, you can always make a soup. Making soup is easy. You can do that in parallel with making dinner, or quickly before breakfast or lunch. You can store and carry it in a thermos flask, or in a simple jar and heat it in a microwave at work. You can also use it as a starter for tomorrow's dinner. Or freeze it for later consumption. Soup, it's great!

I recently got into using tomato powder, have you ever tried it? It would mean more work, but much more shelf-life and granularity of how much tomato you actually want.

I used to immediately throw away half of any load of bread I'd buy because it would always have gone off by the time I got that far down. I would love to have moved that half to a paper bag instead and given it to someone else.

Tinder, but for breads

Same. It’s weird that my misunderstanding of someone’s idea often better than the idea they were actually proposing.