“Where can I get this ingredient? This one costs a fortune and I only need a pinch of it, this one comes in plastic packaging…”

These kinds of problems are all too common when you want to add variety to your recipes, making healthy and tasty food without wasting food, time, money or creating rubbish. It means planning the menu carefully, going to different shops to buy the ingredients, avoiding buying packaging that is bad for the environment… This is where foodStories comes in.

The Spanish startup suggests healthy menus and avoids food waste by delivering to your home – in electric vehicles – the exact amount of each ingredient you need to prepare the dish in sustainable and reusable glass containers.

The business model based on the concept of ‘meal kits’ is already implanted in the United States, but foodStories aims to improve on it be adding a zero waste strategy. On one hand, it prevents food waste by including no more than is needed to prepare each recipe, and on the other it avoids all use of single-use plastics, which means that less refuse is generated. Right now, it is the only company in the world offering a home delivery service of food in reusable glass containers, which the user then returns for sterilisation and use in future orders.

The recipes that foodStories suggests are created by nutritionists and based on fresh seasonal produce sourced from local suppliers. This means cutting out the middlemen and that the food retains more of its natural properties: it avoids the carbon footprint associated with food transport and supports local businesses and the regional economy. The technology it developed allows the company to calculate the cost of each portion of the produce, generate automatic shopping lists every night with the ingredients required for the following days’ meals, issues automatic orders to suppliers and handles the process of cleaning the packaging for reuse.

For now, foodStories’ service is available in Madrid and Barcelona, but it plans to extend operations to other cities in the next two years, starting with Paris.

AtlasAction: Check out the foodStories web and explore more Food projects inside the Atlas of the Future.

Journalist and blogger, he has worked as an editor for several travel, nature and science magazines for the last 20 years.