Good way to get the best deals in town, just not the freshest deals.

Japanese supermarkets usually have a section filled with bentos and other freshly cooked foods like pizzas, croquettes, and spring rolls. But foods like these are only sellable for a limited time and when that clock starts to run down, the supermarkets often start slashing prices to cut their losses. Some regular shoppers get wise to this schedule and deliberately hang around until the stickers come out before buying something.

But in our increasingly online society, there really ought to be a better way to handle this situation and a service called Tabesuke might just be it. This app lists shops in your area where certain items might be nearing the time they become unsellable but still edible. You can find stuff either by searching or just perusing a map of your surrounding area.

The pins are color-coded and red pins mean those stores have something to unload cheaply before it’s too late.

▼ 80 yen for some anpan? Hell yeah!

You can then click on whatever item you want to put a hold on and set a time when you’ll come to buy it. It’s a win-win for both parties as the customer gets some great deals and shops can reduce wasted inventory. It’s also a great way for small businesses to promote themselves and the whole world benefits too with an overall reduction in food waste.

However, Tabesuke is managed by local governments and only a handful across Japan have signed up for it to date, so it’ll require a little luck for your area to have Tabesuke coverage.

For example, in Osaka where I am, there’s unfortunately no data at all, but one big exception for the time being is the 2025 Osaka-Kansai World Expo. A separate program called Banpaku Tabesuke is being held exclusively in the venue of the Expo where guests can get some really sweet deals on the perishable food merch there.

▼ 30 percent off snake-shaped cakes at the time of this writing

It’s been very successful too, with over 11,000 registered users in the first month and a half, and over 80 percent of the 875 listed products finding homes without having to be discarded. Banpaku Tabesuke will be available for the entire run of the Expo.

Although recent efforts have been effective at reducing food waste in Japan, current estimates are still well over four million tons per year. If Tabesuke could bring that 80-percent magic to the rest of the country, it could lead to a remarkable improvement in Japan’s food self-sufficiency.

By the way, the makers of Tabesuke, G-Place, came up with some other handy apps for daily life in Japan. Gomisuke is a neat browser-based app where you can learn all about your area’s garbage collection rules. It’s supported by 150 local governments and also multilingual. They even designed an evacuation system that lets governments give real-time disaster shelter information such as location and occupancy so people know the best place to go.

It’s some of the best stuff to hit the Internet since that map that shows you where all the Dr. Pepper in Japan is sold.

Source: Tabesuke, Banpaku Tabesuke, Gomisuke, PR Times
Featured image: PR Times
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