Some US households throw away up to $3,000 of food a year. The USDA average lands closer to $1,500, but averages hide more than they reveal — your number could be far higher.
It depends on two things you can answer in ten seconds.
Why averages lie.
How many people you're feeding. A single-person household wastes about half of what a four-person household does — somewhere around $750 a year. A household of five or more often clears $2,500. Bigger fridges mean more to keep track of.
How often you cook. This is the counterintuitive one. You'd think "cooks every night" people would waste the most. The opposite is true. The people who waste the most per grocery dollar are the people who rarely cook.
The takeout paradox.
Sunday: full grocery haul. Spinach, salmon, a chicken to roast. Optimism is high. By Thursday: spinach is slime, salmon is past its USE BY, chicken is four days in and you're nervous. Half of it goes in the trash, Thursday-night Thai goes on the credit card.
Households that cook 1-2 nights a week waste more than households that cook 5+ nights, because the takeout displaces the meals the groceries were bought for. Food-waste researchers call this aspirational shopping: we buy the meals we wish we'd cook, not the meals we'll actually cook. The fridge is the audit.
Or skip the math.
We built a 60-second quiz that runs the math and shows you your number. Three questions, no email required.
What's your fridge waste number? Three questions, sixty seconds. We'll show you your number plus the parts of ok2eat that fit it best. Take the quiz →The realistic goal.
Not zero — that's a fantasy. The realistic goal is halving your number. If yours is $2,000, the realistic version of you can keep $1,000. That's a long weekend trip a year, or two months of utilities, or the dinners out that don't show up later as guilt.
To do that you need to know what's in your fridge and how long it lasts. That's the tedious part nobody does, which is why we built ok2eat to do it for you — scan a receipt, every item gets a USDA-calibrated expiry date, the Eat Me First tab tells you what to use tonight. The math becomes automatic.
Your fridge is costing you something. Find out yours, then come back and tell me if the number surprised you.
— Greg, founder of ok2eat