Waste Not, Want Not

The idea

The best food system is a neighborhood.

We all have too much of something and not enough of something else. Waste Not, Want Not is the bridge.

Roughly a third of all food produced globally never gets eaten. Much of that waste happens at the household level — a bunch of kale bought with good intentions, half a bag of rice that's not quite worth keeping, leftovers from a dinner party. This food isn't garbage. It's a resource looking for a recipient.

Waste Not, Want Not is a community food sharing app built around two parallel tracks: one for sharing what you have, one for finding what others are offering nearby. It's not a grocery store — it's the app equivalent of the neighbor who leaves tomatoes from their garden on the front porch with a "take some" sign.

The app is mostly functional but needs more testing and I'm working through how to handle the data distribution challenges that come with real-time neighborhood matching. It launches after Thirst Quencher.

How it works

Two tracks, one community.

🌿 Waste Not

List extra food you have — things in your fridge or pantry you'd rather see used than thrown away. A few taps and it's visible to neighbors nearby.

🛒 Want Not

Browse what neighbors are offering nearby. Claim something before it goes to waste. It's part foraging, part community shopping, all good.

Features

What it does

📍
Hyperlocal listings
Food shared between people who are physically close — reducing pickup friction to nearly zero.
⏰
Freshness timing
Listings show when food was added and when it's likely to expire, so nothing lingers.
🤝
No transaction
No money changes hands. This isn't a marketplace — it's mutual aid made easy.
🔒
Privacy considered
Location is used for matching, never stored broadly. Designed to share food, not data.

The hard part

Being honest about the challenges.

Waste Not, Want Not is the most architecturally complex app in the Skyberrys suite. Unlike the other apps — which can operate entirely locally on your device — community food sharing requires some form of centralized infrastructure to match listings with recipients nearby.

I'm working through the right approach: something that's privacy-respecting, resilient at small community scale, and doesn't require a venture-funded backend to keep running. If you have experience with distributed systems or community-tech infrastructure and want to think through this together, I'd genuinely love to hear from you.

Stay in touch

Coming after Thirst Quencher.

Interested in helping test, or contributing to the infrastructure design?

🌾 Get in touch