Feeding Families, Not Landfills: How Flashfood Uses Scandit to Reduce Food Waste

Flashfood was built on a simple but powerful idea: the food that ends up in a landfill today was someone's potential dinner.

By partnering with grocers such as Kroger, Loblaw, and Meijer to discount surplus inventory, Flashfood connects shoppers with great deals and keeps good food out of the waste stream. The mission is as clear as the company's slogan, ‘feed families, not landfills.’

$400 million

As of 2026, Flashfood has saved shoppers over $400 million and prevented over 175 million pounds of food from going to landfill.

To achieve this, Flashfood operates a two-sided marketplace:

• On one side, shoppers looking for deals.
• On the other, grocery store teams looking to reduce waste by getting surplus items listed on the platform.

The grocer side of the platform is where the mission is won or lost every day. If posting items takes too long or is too much effort, associates won't do it. If the process is error-prone or clunky, adoption stalls. And if too few items get listed, shoppers stop coming back.

To fix that, Flashfood set out to build a new Partner App for associates to use in store: faster, more intuitive, and built around the real working conditions of grocery store backrooms.

The key to making it work was investing in technology that would enable faster, more accurate, and more scalable posting.

"What we're fundamentally competing against is the simplicity of just throwing items away. Reducing the labor required to post items is critical to both our mission and our partners' ROI."

Yixin Zhu, VP of Engineering at Flashfood.

Challenge

The grocery store backroom is a harsh environment for technology. Lighting is inconsistent. Labels are sometimes damaged. Associates are busy. And the reality Flashfood was competing against was simple: if posting surplus items feels like extra work, teams will throw them away instead.

Before building a new Partner App, Flashfood's previous approach to variable label capture required store associates to list weighted items one at a time, resulting in significant manual data entry. Expiry dates, product attributes, and pricing had to be entered by hand. The process was slow and could be inconsistent.

Bulk posting and weighted item challenges

At the time, bulk posting was simply not possible. Flashfood used basic barcode scanning and explored open source optical character recognition (OCR) solutions to automate data capture, but couldn't get them to work reliably, particularly for weighted items from deli, bakery, and meat departments.

Every additional manual step and every moment of friction slowed down already stretched store teams. That friction limited how many items got listed, meaning less food was saved.

The strategic imperative was clear. To unlock more supply for shoppers, reduce food waste at scale, and deliver ROI for grocery partners, Flashfood needed a new scanning solution.

One that guaranteed performance in real-store conditions and captured full labels accurately, quickly, and with minimal manual effort across all the different devices grocery partners provided to associates.

Solution

When Flashfood began searching for a new label-scanning engine in 2025, they had specific criteria in mind:

• Proven performance in grocery and retail environments on a wide range of smart devices
• The ability to read multiple barcodes and text from a single label
• A collaborative and future-looking technology partner

Scandit's track record in the grocery industry gave the Flashfood team confidence. Its work with major grocers and quick commerce companies, such as Instacart, demonstrated that they understood the complexities of the environment in which Flashfood operates.

Flashfood integrated two Scandit products into the new iOS and Android Partner App.

• Barcode Scanning SDK: Fast, accurate barcode scanning across variable store conditions such as inconsistent lighting, damaged labels, and mixed barcode formats.
• Smart Label Capture: AI-powered capture that reads multiple barcodes and extracts text from labels in a single scan, automatically populating product details including price, expiry dates, and weight.

After testing the SDK in partner stores on different devices and confirming the desired performance, the next step was to integrate with the Flashfood Partner App.

With pre-built components, code samples, and documentation, integration with the native Android and iOS apps was straightforward. And Scandit’s support team was there at every step and happy to take feedback on future product roadmap items that could bring further benefits to Flashfood and other Scandit customers.

At one point, Flashfood shared its barcode data and performance metrics with the Scandit support team, and together they worked through the right scanning configuration to hit the success metrics.

"We came to them with real barcodes and real performance data, and they engaged with us like a true partner. For a company of our size, the level of attention and flexibility Scandit showed was notable."

Yixin Zhu, VP of Engineering at Flashfood

Today, a store associate opens the Flashfood Partner App, navigates to the posting workflow, and uses the camera to scan items. With bulk posting enabled by Scandit's multi-scan capability, associates can capture up to 10 items in a single session.

The app uses Smart Label Capture to automatically pull product details from each label, including pricing, expiry dates, and weight, and pre-populates the posting form. Associates review the information, make any adjustments, and list on the Flashfood marketplace in less than 30 seconds.

Results

The impact was immediate. Since launching with AI-powered scanning at its core, Flashfood has seen a 33% increase in the total number of items posted.

Scan accuracy and reliability in real-store conditions, and the multi-scan bulk posting workflow are now a core part of Flashfood's highest-performing grocery partners.

The knock-on effects matter too. More consistent, higher-volume posting means more deals available for shoppers. And when shoppers keep seeing good deals, they return.

More supply drives greater shopper engagement, which in turn drives better outcomes for grocery partners. The whole system compounds.

"Scandit has helped Flashfood remove a major point of friction from the surplus posting process - making it faster, more accurate, and more scalable for the grocery teams who use our platform every day. That directly translates into more items posted, less food wasted, and better ROI for our retail partners."

Yixin Zhu, VP of Engineering at Flashfood

What's Next?

Flashfood's vision for the future is a posting experience with virtually no manual entry required. A near-term priority is expanding multi-scan support to weighted items, which represent a significant share of the inventory that their partners post. That work is already underway in collaboration with Scandit.

For other digital marketplace or grocery technology providers evaluating barcode and label scanning, Flashfood's advice is straightforward:

"Don't underestimate how much the quality of your scanning technology shapes everything downstream. Posting volume, data accuracy, partner adoption, shopper experience, partner ROI, it all connects back to how fast and reliably items get listed."

Yixin Zhu, VP of Engineering at Flashfood