Living Sustainably Has Just Gotten Easier!

Greetings curious readers, and welcome to our brand-new blog!

We are CHOMP, your new food-saving companion here to tell you that living sustainably has just gotten a little easier. Here is our story 🙂

We began our journey in early-2020 just as the covid pandemic hit Hong Kong with its first wave. We noticed how quickly the pandemic was changing the way we were going about our daily lives, from working to socialising, consuming entertainment, going to school, you name it. Restaurants and cafes were closing, and we couldn’t help but wonder, what was happening to all that food that was not being sold or didn’t make it to a delivery order? What was happening to all that food surplus? Perfectly edible foods with a short shelf life or simply, unsold.

Living in a city that boasts one of the highest number of restaurants per capita in the world, you can probably imagine much food is thrown away at the end of each day. From research, we found that Hong Kong throws away approximately 13 million bowls of rice per day. PER DAY! That’s crazy, right? AND in Hong Kong alone. That’s when we started thinking, there’s probably more we can do in Hong Kong to bring that number down. Even if we could bring that number down from 13 million to 12 million, every small step counts and every crumb matters. More importantly, we’ve got to start somewhere. That’s when we decided to create CHOMP, a platform that connects customers to F&B businesses with food in need of rescuing.

How does it work? Businesses with food in need of rescuing can package their goodies together in a Mystery Box and sell them at a discounted price on the CHOMP HK app. That food is then made available to YOU to purchase, rescue and pickup directly at their store. It’s that simple. We are a pickup service for a couple of reasons – (1) using delivery drivers means more CO2 produced and (2) we want you to go check out these amazing places and hidden gems that you may not have visited before. We are about 6 weeks old as of now so bear with us, there is more coming and the aim is to build a platform, which you can always check in with to find new meals and deals to rescue and save in your neighbourhood.

Now, if you’re thinking, “Pickup? Really? Well, that’s not for me”, don’t feel bad, that used to be us as well, and to no surprise. Hong Kong is one of the most convenient cities to live in and there is food literally around every corner and at every time of the day. We too have also ordered McDonald’s before although the McDonald’s was right across the road from us. But we’ve made changes since then, little changes, bit by bit, and are less likely to do that today. We created CHOMP with the thought, “is this something we would use?”, and although this will sound biased, the answer to that is yes. Here is why.

CHOMP brings you deals on meals and new surprises with every purchase. For people looking to live more sustainably but don’t know how, CHOMP is your answer. We give you access to amazing foods and products from our amazing partners and make that available to purchase with a little intrigue and excitement. With every purchase on CHOMP, you know you’ve effectively saved food from being thrown away, and for that, you should give yourself a pat on the back.

The title says it all, CHOMP is here to make living sustainably a little easier. We are not asking you to sub out all your meals with Mystery Boxes, that would be amazing, but we know that’s not realistic. Like we said earlier, every small step counts and every crumb matters. As Anne-Marie Bonneau said, “We don’t need a handful of people doing zero waste perfectly, we need millions of people doing it imperfectly”.