New mobile apps offer Londoners food that cafes and restaurants are throwing away at the end of the day, George Timberlake reports

Waste food is a massive issue in London, with every 5 bags of shopping bought, one is thrown away with food that could have been used to feed hungry mouths. New apps such as ‘Olio’ and ‘Too Good to Go’ are hoping to minimise the waste. Both apps let you search around your local location to find food that is being thrown away from people or restaurants, you can then pick up the food, which ranges from leftovers to alcohol, for free or for a small fee.

A report in the Metro claims that a woman from London can feed herself on just £5 a week. Josephine Liang posts her successes on her Instagram. 16 to 24-year-olds are spending more on food than any other age group because they know so little about cooking, research reveals and spending an average of £63.65 a week on food. Watch our reporter Isla Russel went out and about to Elephant and Castle to try the app ‘Too Good to Go’ herself, to see if she could save any money on her weekly food bill.

After applying for food from the local café at 12pm, we got conformation that a bag of food could be collected at 4pm. This delay in time is a disadvantage to the app, meaning you do have to wait around. This café was the place with the earliest pick-up, with others not being able to collect until 9:30pm.

When the goods were finally collected from the café we were entitled to a bag of leftover food, which consisted of 2 homemade sandwiches and 2 large almond croissants, for a small fee of £2.40. Overall the app works well if you live within a central location and do not mind waiting a while to eat!