When a store has a buy-one-get-one-free deal, it would be nice to have an app that would match me up with somebody else in the store who also wants only one of that thing; then one of us could buy them and we could split the cost. I can't be the only one who doesn't have room in the freezer for a second bone-in pork roast.
I've been thinking it would be a win-win-win situation if I had the choice to donate the other half as money instead of as an item: I get one item cheaper, someone gets a useful, extra donation from me, and the store gets to sell the other item again.
It's only a win for the store if they would sell out of the product if you purchased two, as they would only make the profit off of selling one item to you rather than two. That's why those food bank donations annoy me, they supermarket effectively takes a cut of all the donations.
For emergency preparedness, I keep a few hundred cans of food around. I live in a rural area, and this is prudent.
I never eat them all best-before, and as this is canned food, best-before is not an expiry/safety date, even remotely.
It is a flavour date.
So I donate my stuff, before purchasing new. And before anyone gets all weird about it, I eat from the same stock I donate, even the day of donation.
This means people get good quality food, I get to renew my stocks, and the grocery store with the donation bin, may or may not have been where I bought the food.
If more people did this, we'd all be better able to handle disasters, and those in need would be better fed. A real win-win.
I have had all three possible experiences with food banks (used them, volunteered at them, employee of one) and I would be really surprised if that gets used, or benefits the food bank if it does.
Food banks have grocery store-like buying power and relationships with wholesalers and local producers, and in my experience nearly all of the food they distribute comes from those sources.
The can drives around the holidays are mostly just for awareness. At the ones I worked at checking, sorting and packing those was very costly in labor both paid and volunteered.
We always accepted direct food donations because americans are super fucking weird about donating money to the immiserated, but will also get very mad if you turn away their useless donations. Which is bad for PR, so against the goals of the org. We always accepted them but "how can we not" was a constant question.
Some charities spend lots of money on things other than their main mission. Whereas if food is donated, you can be quite sure that isn't funding a yacht for the CEO.
Have you talked to the food bank about their policy on past-date canned food? I know at least one food bank where they told people not to donate any food past the date as it will get tossed (plus additional staff and volunteer labor to sort through the stuff). I assume this is common for liability reasons at least.
Some cans have a long time until expiration date, like 3 years. If the GP keeps the cans for 2.5 years and then donate them when they still have 6 month left until the expiration date, is that enough time for the food bank to use them?
When I volunteered at my local food bank turnaround was relatively quick. I remember sorting through paper-covered cans just three weeks after we collected the Canstructure donations to the food pantry centers. However, I don't know how soon they were handed out to people; probably pretty quickly (<1 week) because there wasn't much stock in the building.
Most food banks in the U.S. use tolerances that go months beyond the dates on packaged and canned foods and also take into account the integrity of the cans/packages. Fresh prepared foods like bakery items are repackaged for quick redistribution. Fruits/veggies (which are a very small portion of what food banks get) are distributed according to their condition but otherwise spoil the same there as anywhere else. And larger foodbank systems distribute things to the agencies - where people who need food actually go - using these guidelines and sometimes have the same food storage methods as grocery distribution centers might. Liability is a concern, but more in the sense of distributing healthy, useful food vs lawsuits.
Sounds like someone at the "at least one food bank" doesn't understand that there literally is no liability for past-date canned food. I am pretty sure dates on canned food wasn't a thing when I was growing up. It's just another way of prodding the customer to consume.
> It's just another way of prodding the customer to consume.
Not really; expiration dates are printed on food (including canned food) because customers want them. Manufacturers are responding to, not attempting to drive, customer demand.
That video doesn't even address the question. It says, correctly, that the dates have no particular meaning and are generally unregulated. It doesn't say why they're there.
Hah okay: thats a fair point and I googled this just for you - and for future me.
Marks & Spencer introduced them in 1970 in the UK (1)
It's true there was a survey of consumers and folks favored them, but I will refrain from posting the enduring veracity and reflectiveness of a survey and point out that consumers likely wanted dates that meant something
They are often meaningless and we can assume the consumer wasn't in love with dates that are more complex than not.
In most of the US that’d be illegal (unless the four pack was itself a separate product instead of four individual ones). And “two for $5” and “buy one at $5 get one free” are considered different - the first almost always has to work out to $2.50 each unless they get very explicit with a “save $1 when you buy two” wording. Most stores don’t bother.
Whoa, 2 for $2.22 is something I haven't seen for 15 years here in northern WV. Usually like 2.19 for one, and two is pushing $3.75 now (maybe $3.50 if you're a rewards member).
I suppose we have excise taxes to thank for that.
They do seem quite at liberty to put signs that say 2/3.50 and then have the individual price listed higher beside it.
> In most of the US that’d be illegal (unless the four pack was itself a separate product instead of four individual ones).
Really? Because KFC does this all the time with a la carte biscuits. The per-item rate is higher if you buy four (as advertised on the menu) than if you were to buy one four times in a row.
If it's part of some combo it can fly, but if it's literally "order 4 and get charged more than ordering 1 four times" you can probably report them to the Commerce Department.
Food sharing in general should be encouraged (as a fickle single man I end up throwing away a lot of food, after e.g. opening a jar of tomato sauce and consuming half of it and leaving the other half in the fridge to use "soon"), but that's odd if it only looks in stores.
I'm going to make billions providing an escrow service for food splitting where I guarantee the provenance of items like this. I'll make sure to find a use for blockchain so I can really up my profits.
Don't sell the food; sell an NFT of the food. That'll -really- up your profits. Plus, NFTs never spoil!...until you add that feature. Once you have spoiling half cans of tomato sauce in the metaverse you'll be rich!
Regardless, they are non-fungible tokens with expiration date.
But if you really want to be extra pedantic: the Ethereum Name System is a domain system running on the blockchain, and each domain is a NFT with an expiration date.
Tomato sauce, wine, soups, and other liquid foodstuffs are excellent contenders for ice cube trays. A housemate in university introduced me to 'red wine cubes' from the freezer for chucking into beef Ragu and it turned my world right side up. We now have bags of all sorts in our freezer.
The ice cube trays trick also changed my life after my sister showed me. I even ended buying different sizes of molds to use depending on what I'm freezing.
During the lockdowns I also started with some more traditional preservation techniques like oils and vinegars. Not for long term storage (not enough space) but just for a couple days or weeks at a time. E.g. buying a bag of average quality olives then chuck them in a jar with good olive oil, fresh herbs, garlic, optionally things like chili and an orange rind. Yields both great olives as well as flavored oil for dressings.
I wouldn't consider myself a wine snob, but I'm not really looking forward to being served a nice Pinot Grigio from Trentino (DOC) with cubes of frozen Liebfraumilch. The logistics of keeping matching iced versions of wine sound overwhelmingly complex.
In fairness, you'd be the type of person who always drinks the same white wine at a time. Presumably every 4 or so bottles you would run out of ice cubes and could switch. You also could have a variety of red wines available.
Before covid, I used to bake a batch of three baguettes probably 3x/week, bringing them to work to share. I also brought in growlers of homebrew to share after work. People asked me if, on account of being at home the last two years, I'd been doing a lot more of it. In fact, I've baked and brewed significantly less in that time, and I miss both the sharing and the social time that came about because of those things.
I am also fickle with my food, and a vegan to boot. I solved this problem of leftovers for my situation by making soup. With leftovers, like your tomato sauce, you can always make a soup. Making soup is easy. You can do that in parallel with making dinner, or quickly before breakfast or lunch. You can store and carry it in a thermos flask, or in a simple jar and heat it in a microwave at work. You can also use it as a starter for tomorrow's dinner. Or freeze it for later consumption. Soup, it's great!
I recently got into using tomato powder, have you ever tried it? It would mean more work, but much more shelf-life and granularity of how much tomato you actually want.
I used to immediately throw away half of any load of bread I'd buy because it would always have gone off by the time I got that far down. I would love to have moved that half to a paper bag instead and given it to someone else.
As a German the cultural differences around bread are really interesting. Already the cartoon picture of the half loaf of bread is so fundamentally different to what I am expecting it to look like. Also people in the comments saying they rarely not finish a loaf of bread.
This [1] is how it looks like here and when bought at a bakery it's usually so big that we buy it in quarters and even that lasts a couple of days. It also tastes very different from what the rest of the world considers bread. It's much stronger in flavor.
That's a sourdough bread, right? Now, there's a rabbit hole to dive into. It uses a different type of levain / yeast culture compared to bread based on dried yeast.
Long story short, sourdough was / is how bread was made throughout history. Fermentation takes a very long time due to the nature of the levain. At some point, bakers noticed how the leftovers from brewers yeasts drastically shorten fermentation. That and industrialization led to modern day bread you find in the supermarket.
Jon from Proof Bread on YT does a much better job at explaining. [1]
Another great watch is Michael Pollan's "Cooked" series. In the 3rd episode, he explores bread, it's history and makes the case about modern industrialization affecting the quality and the nutritional value of modern bread. [2]
There is “artisan” bread, made by hand, which is the round kind. Then there is “sandwich bread”, which is the rectangular kind.
Ingredients: Artisan bread is usually just flour, water, salt, yeast (sourdough is just flour and water, too). Sandwich bread can include milk or other fats to make it softer and is more of a “cake”. In industrial settings, there are a lot of preservatives included in the sandwich bread.
Mixing: Artisan bread is mixed by hand. Sandwich bread is mixed in a mixer. The former thus has less worked gluten.
Shaping: Artisan bread is made into a ball (similar to “spinning” pizza dough). Sandwich bread is poured into a tin and requires no shaping.
Bake: Artisan bread is baked at high heat, around 500F, in steam. Sandwich bread is baked in a specific tin at lower heat, like a cake.
As you can see, the sandwich bread is easily scalable and, being essentially a cake, is preferred by many. A loaf of sandwich bread is around $1-$2 where an artisan bread is like 4x more.
Also, there are flours, like rye, which have to be made with sandwich-type methods. These flours don’t have enough gluten to hold shape on their own.
> Sandwich bread is poured into a tin and requires no shaping.
> being essentially a cake
I don't think either of those are true - at least not an any bakery I've ever been to.
Cakes are a very specific type of baked good, made with a batter not a dough, which do not use yeast for leavening. Cakes also do not rely on gluten, and in fact limit it's formation by utilizing low protein flour.
Also, bread dough will never 'pour' unless you've gone horribly wrong.
For batter vs. dough: yes, they are not the same, but adding any fat to dough inhibits glutten (e.g., https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/36267/how-does-f...), which is why sandwich bread is soft and spongy. It may not pour, but neither does muffin batter or brownies, for example. My point is there is a whole spectrum for gluten formation.
Compare the cake recipe https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/classic-birthday-ca... to the bread recipe above. The main difference is that butter is added along with eggs, and the leavening is different. Artisan bread only has the 4 ingredients, sandwich bread adds sugar, milk, and oil, and cake changes leavening and adds eggs/butter. As you go up the spectrum, you are intentionally avoiding strong gluten development, resulting in smaller holes and softer texture. See challah bread for another data point of bread with eggs+oil https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/classic-challah-rec.... You can also make the gluten weak by using something like 100% rye, which has to be baked in the same tin (though that would have a harder crust).
I have made that exact King Arthur sandwich bread recipe and it doesn't do anything like "pour". Loaf pans are used for sandwich bread to get more lift and a more sandwich-friendly shape, but there is far more gluten development than any cake batter. You can use that same recipe to make rolls, for instance, and they bake up just fine.
The cake recipe has a 2:3 ratio of flour to sugar, while the bread recipe has a 14:1 ratio. It also has a 2:1 ratio of flour to fat, with the bread being 6:1. The cake also has a much higher hydration ratio, more milk, eggs, and a completely different mixing process.
Kneading bread is very hard work; occasionally I do it for a single loaf, but it really doesn't scale above 1 or 2 loaves. Even artisinal bakeries have machines for it.
This is one of the funniest things when introducing people to some of the ingredients and methods used in commercial food production -- stuff like Xanthan gum as a thickener, soy lechtin as an emulsifier, or calcium propanate as a preservative. Once people know what they do and how it works they stop being "scary chemicals" corporations are putting in our food. I think it's a branding issue, sodium bicarbonate is a scary chemical but baking soda is a household ingredient, MSG is super scary but seaweed salt sounds delicious.
I tend to bake two loaves (always with tangzhong if the particular recipe can tolerate it), wrap both, immediately freeze one, and the other one lasts somewhere short of a week.
If you keep it airtight, the crust will dampen from the moisture that comes from the inside.
Which storing bread that has a crust worth preserving, I tend to make sure it gets a little air (covering it with linen cloths, for example), and accept the small amount of drying out that comes with this form of storage.
> Also, there are flours, like rye, which have to be made with sandwich-type methods. These flours don’t have enough gluten to hold shape on their own.
The bread parent linked (and most German breads for that matter) is a rye bread!
FWIW in the US this is called "artisan bread", as opposed to supermarket bread. You can get it in bakeries in every major city, and at farmer's markets, but not most supermarkets, especially not outside the city. It's really popular in San Francisco for example.
I found this out because I brought some bread from back to the suburbs to my parents, and they thought it was awesome, and had never had it before ... ! I haven't lived in the suburbs for ~20 years so I forgot that the availability of food is different.
> but not most supermarkets, especially not outside the city.
Not sure what part of the country you live in, but this kind of bread is available at even the smallest out-of-the-way grocery store anywhere in California, and on most of the west coast that I've been to. I know because my family is hooked on it...
It's probably more available in California, but I'd also say that there's a lot of bread of that shape that isn't "artisan bread".
If it's baked by a local, skilled person (an artiasan!) and delivered early in the morning, I'd call that artisan bread.
But I think a lot of supermarket bread is basically baked in a big facility mostly by machines. I don't know the details but I think they have to make the ingredients more homogeneous for this to work. And if it's not delivered the same day, they will need to put preservatives in it.
IMO the difference is like night and day. My dad is the kind of person who swears by everything Costco, but even he likes the fresh artisan bread.
Keep in mind, this service appears to be focused on India, where the kind of loaf bread pictured is also not the most traditional. (When I lived in Afghanistan and would occasionally buy loaves of sandwich bread at groceries catering to expats, my Indian colleagues referred to it as "double roti"—a term I found delightful. I wonder how common that usage is in India these days.)
> this service appears to be focused on India, where the kind of loaf bread pictured is also not the most traditional.
While that's technically true, when we use the word "bread" we generally mean this (Western?) kind of bread. For the Indian kinds of bread we normally use roti. In everyday contexts, if someone says bread, it almost always refers to the kind of bread pictured there.
Indian cuisine also has a pretty wide selection of different "breads" (dough patties? DeepL does not even know a word for "Teigfladen" (de)). Naan and Roti are probably the most known, but there are several others including very fatty ones.
(somebody from India please chime in, I don't know the names :-) )
(Not from India but had an Indian roommate once and attended his wedding in India thereafter (obviously :-))
Having eaten bread many places in Germany over the years, I certainly is aware of the shape of bread you show, but I've also had plenty of loaves of bread similar to the image in the linked site in Germany.
Well, we Germans are known for our baked goods and at a bakery you will find a wide variety including French croissants, baguette or Italian ciabatta. But at least in Bavaria "bread" is the one I linked and you refer to everything else by name. Whole grain bread usually comes in that form and of course toast. It's just not what comes to my mind especially in the context of a loaf.
I've seen it as a throwaway gag in a few movies too - also usually with French speaking characters for some reason - observing how terrible baked goods (or sometimes bread specifically) are in the US.
I wonder if this is an example of emojis taking over public consciousness. The bread picture on this site is clearly the bread emoji, even though this is a picture and it could have been any bread shape.
My friends and I once (as in, one day...) went stealng bread from doorsteps in Germany, until we tasted one that was so ...different... to what we considered to be 'bread', we never did it again.
Black bread?
'Different', meaning 'absolutely disgusting' to [our] tastes, at that time.
Our tastebuds have to learn to appreciate new tastes. So if you grew up on a very sugary taste palate, having dark bread for the first time will be tough. If you were unlucky enough to pick one with added caraway I'm not surprised at all. That has some strong and somewhat bitter taste and serves you right for stealing it xD
As an Austrian I can fully agree. we buy bread in full, halves or quarters and I eat it for a week without toasting. bread that is getting too dry to eat can be toasted or cut up in cubes to be used as croutons in soups and salads or used as a base for dumplings.
We'd always eat frozen bread at my grandma's. She'd buy a new loaf, pull an old one out of the freezer, and put the new one in. I don't think we ever had a fresh slice of bread there. I love this memory for some reason.
Yup. I've been making my own bread for ~4 years, mainly due to family. When I know I have a busy week ahead or travelling, I make two loaves that weekend and freeze one. Family gets good sourdough bread, and the toast from frozen is in no way noticeably different.
You might want to try par-baking and freezing, instead of just freezing the cooked loaves. At the peak of my sourdough-ratholing last year, I scaled up my recipe size so that I was making four loaves (batards weighing in at around 650-700 grams), and then par-baking and freezing three of them for use over the next week or two.
My method:
1. Do whatever it is that you do before baking a loaf of bread
2. Bake the loaf for around 2/3rds the target time. In my case, this is about a half hour. I bake these loaves at 200°C, on a baking stone and covered with a huge aluminum salad bowl to sorta emulate a steam oven. At the end of the half hour, the crust is still white due to the bowl, and just starting to go brown on the tips of whatever cuts I added.
3. Take the loaf out and let it cool for a couple hours
4. Seal it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer
5. Proceed with life for a time
6. When in need of more bread, take a par-baked loaf out of the freezer and put it on the counter, and pre-heat the oven to 200°C
7. Once pre-heated (~20 mins later, let's say), put the still-frozen loaf (sans plastic!!) into the oven uncovered, and cook for another 15 mins
8. Take it out to let it cool and enjoy
IMO a par-baked and then frozen loaf is noticeably better than a single-baked loaf, at least when using a home oven. I speculate that this is because a home oven needs a longer total baking time than a (hotter, steam-injected) commercial oven to fully bake + get the right crust, and that extra time turns into a drier crumb. But I further speculate that the par-bake-and-freeze technique preserves the crumb, since the crumb is really pretty much done by the time the 30-min par-bake is over, and the crumb ends up spending a good chunk of the 15-min finishing bake just de-thawing rather than drying out.
Pff, wait til you discover you can freeze also sausages and butter without losing any quality, which sadly can't be said about bread, defrosted bread tastes pretty bad, which is why I don't freeze it. I mean if I would be that desperate or lazy that I wouldn't want to go to small convenience store right under my building to buy half loaf, I have always at home enough flour and it would make more sense to keep dry yeast in stock to prepare own bread.
I would have agreed with you completely until I got married and discovered that it's not the freezing that does it, but the thawing. It's all in how you thaw.
Now I pull the loaf out a few hours before it's needed and let it thaw at room temperature in the pantry. Definitely leave it sealed.
I laugh now thinking about how as kids we put the bread in the microwave on defrost. That makes some damn nasty bread :-D
Depends on the sausage I guess, and on the defrosting process. Personally, I don't like to freeze any meat - chances are that it had been frozen already, and refreezing it will ruin it.
My mom freezes everything to save money, and there is an element of emancipation for me to be able to not do that, but generally speaking I just find it a destructive practice from a flavour perspective.
The only complaint I have is that when there isn't space, she forces it in anyway and then you end up with mangled, frozen slices that don't fit in the toaster.
If you have the space, a second deep freeze is a game changer. You can often find them for cheap or even free, the ones from the 90s seem to last forever.
I just _know_ she'd love to have a chest freezer (runs in her family I think); alas, we live in a London apartment, space is one thing we don't have.
On a side note, with energy prices (which are typically high in the UK compared to some other places) I'd be loath to use an "old" freezer. We once rented a place, and I found their circa 80s freezer user more electricity than we did for the rest of the flat.
I've always been one to prefer newer, more energy efficient devices even at a higher initial cost (it's somewhat of a hobby of mine to see how energy efficient I can make things in my home), it's times like these where I feel it's actually paying off.
Freezing bread alters it. I can't recall off hand what it does but I don't much like the taste. I'm not particularly a fan of bread at the best of times though, so I might be more susceptible to the change taste of frozen bread than most. In fact it's pretty much only freshly baked bread that I enjoy.
The change in consistency happens most quickly at temperatures in the single digits, that’s also why bread in the fridge gets stale faster. But toasting the bread reverts the process. So the trick is to defrost in the microwave and pop it in the oven (if still in a loaf) or toaster (if sliced). Put some water on the crust to prevent it from baking too much. Works wonders on yesterday’s rolls too.
We have delivered batches of 7 loaves from a local bakery every 2-3 weeks, and of course freeze them. The trick is to, as soon as I can after receiving them, put the loaves with their original bag inside also a large freezer bag, so they are double-bagged, and right into the freezer. When taking it out, toast it as needed, either so lightly that it just thaws, or as toasty as you like if you want toast.
While nothing is like a chunk or slice of bread still warm from the oven, this is more than good enough and often not distinguishable from the bread as received. One note is that this is pretty high-density bread, so it might not work as well with 'fluffier' breads. In any case, the double bagging does work for me to eliminate that ucky freezer burn taste, or at least put it off so that it takes 2+months in the freezer for it to appear.
I've also found for cakes and pastries that wrapping in cling wrap, then aluminum foil tightly sealed by rolling the edges together, then a freezer bag works well for many months.
You don't toast it _all the way_. Heat it up a modest amount, just enough for the ice crystals to melt, and it will spring to life as if it were a practically fresh slice of bread (until it is freezer burnt, at which point it will be a little bad).
The method I was taught was to wrap the slice of bread in a paper towel and microwave for 5-10 seconds.
Freezer bread is only the same as never-frozen bread if you toast it. Otherwise it tastes odd and there's really no good way to defrost it quickly. I don't always want toast.
Rolls are especially poor in the freezer as they have to first be half defrosted then cut then toasted and even then the top has a slightly odd taste, probably due to the thickness. Of course, I'll still stick them in there rather than wasting them, I'll just be miffed about it.
I'm eating loads of bread, good bread is not easy to come by in London, at least to my taste. There is this one place I like, they do big loafs that reminds me of the bread my grand parents were buying in France. Problem is that they won't sell me halves and my partner doesn't eat much so I freeze it from time to time.
Frozen bread from a decent bakery always beat any kind of "fresh" supermarket bread.
I do the same with bagels / english muffins / etc., it's crazy to waste perfectly good bread if you just didn't get around to eating it before it spoiled. If it's a baguette or country loaf that's about to go bad I usually just make croutons / breadcrumbs out of it.
It really is a game changer. Even just putting it in the fridge prolongs its shelf life. Just make sure to keep the bag sealed with a twist tie, to keep the bread from drying out. I also save the heels until last, as well. They make good end caps while you're finishing the rest of the loaf.
My flatmate, who is a baker by trade, violently disagrees with putting bread in the fridge. He argues that the condensation in the bag/box you store it in increases the chance of mold and interferes with the bread's structural integrity.
He recommends to store bread in a paper bag in a bread bin somewhere on your counter top, but a clay baker or something similiar will also do the trick.
I'll add, that it's perfectly legit to store bread in the fridge if it would go bad otherwise. Just one of the usual nitpicks tradespeople have regarding their line of work.
Yep, I do. If not ergonomically perfect for sandwiches, they are great for toasting for soup or oatmeal or ramen noodles. They also make an excellent meal when broiled with some chives and melty cheese on top. Heels are under-rated.
My wife disdains bread heels too.
She grew up upper middle-class, while I grew up in a working poor family.
My theory is that one's estimation of heels is in inverse proportion to how well-to-do your family was growing up.
This is super awesome; pleasantly surprised to see this is relevant for my home town :-D
Also, funnily this is how they are sourcing the data. Ingenious!!
"The search is only available in select big cities in India because it uses Dunzo as the data source. No affiliation with Dunzo.
The API used to call Dunzo is open but undocumented. So if someone from Dunzo is reading this, don't be sending take-down notices. This is a very niche and tiny thing and is unlikely to put any strain on your servers."
What I love about this is the way half loaves are found, simple but really clever.
Search for "bread" with the correct category, and then filter out all results that are greater than 300 grams. It works out because all the artisanal bread are excluded with a regex.
Mel Brooks joke: a man in a deli notices that there's nothing but salt on every shelf. He asks the shopkeeper if he sells a lot of salt. The shopkeeper says "If I sell a bag of salt a week I'm lucky. But the guy who sells me salt, boy, can he sell salt!"
This is a great idea that "doesn't scale" and could one day be a $1B business. Well done!
He sucks at selling, however the guy who he buys the salt from is excellent at selling. Therefore capable of getting the shop owner to buy excessive amounts of salt.
Because big business is great at selling us more than we really need (can consume). We are buying full loaves and rarely using them up. This is likely by design too... Margins are probably higher for the seller this way. So the website helps you pass off your excess.
Could be...think about this: a niche search engine that tells you which individual products are in stock, and where they are, could be very valuable indeed. How many times have you thought, "I need to buy an X right now, but I don't know which store(s) carry it?"
but similar sites already exist, and 99% of the time this question can be answered by putting the product X into google with your city name/country name if you're willing to have it shipped.
It could become some niche search engine but I don't see any money at all involved. Nobody is earning commission on half a loaf of bread. There's no money there. There are already store stock tracking websites for many profitable products (like photography equipment) and general search. The half a loaf of bread niche is a guarantee that there's no money in this particular site.
For in person shopping I don't believe this exists. But look I said it "could" be a $billion company. This sort of project looks a lot like early versions of what eventually become $BBB companies. No one can predict the future.
as long as you can scrape their stock from the website, it exists. If you can't, then this site can't solve it.
For example, I look for photography equipment prices (in canada) using photoprice.ca, which scrapes canadian camera stores that have their stock online like henry's or broadway camera, as well as comparing against amazon.ca, amazon.com, and US stores that ship to canada like Adorama and B&H.
The issue is just 'is the data available'. None of that makes it profitable if it's just loaves of bread.
I see a new dating app in the making ... match people who want half loaves with others who want half loaves and send them out to buy a full loaf together.
There are two halves to every half loaf, as well as the various quantities in beween. Matching karen who has eaten the first half, with Darren who has 9 (of the original 29 slices) left with BillyJoeJimBob who has eaten 'every other slice' sounds ike a nightmare....but so much like real loaf....i mean life.
In NL every supermarket, baker or other place where you can buy bread will be more than happy to sell you half loaves, to the point that plenty of them have them pre-sliced and packaged ready to go.
Yep, i also don't quite understand what needs to be solved here.
I just ask the cashier in the bakery for a half or quarter loaf. Or grab a pre-cut half/quarter one in the supermarket. There are plenty of options (types of bread, sourdough or not, based on different grains, etc) over here in germany.
The experiences of others could be vastly different than yours. A possible answer: the developer has been throwing away bread, and couldn't easily find their favourite bread in smaller quantities in a city in India.
> This website is of course a non-useful, silly little thing. But I hope that it can get people to start thinking about why more stores don't sell half loaves when it seems like a more practical thing to do.
Yes, I guess so. It looks very niche and more like an excuse to build something though :) Nothing wrong with that, however I'd just cut it at home and freeze the rest for later consumption.
Here in New Jersey my local Whole Foods doesn't sell half-loaves anymore. I like some of their breads but I'm not willing to spend $6 for a loaf that I won't be able to finish.
Maybe the bakeries in India don’t offer this service/product for some reason? If so, a website like this could put some pressure on them to introduce half-loaves.
In Czechia as well, all supermarkets carry (500-600g) half loaves, only difference being that some are cut and packaged already directly from 3rd party bakery and some they cut in shop, usually if they have their own bakery like Tesco or Albert (Ahold). And of course ALL convenience stores carry 1/2 loaves, many even 1/4 loaves.
Maybe if you don't have a freezer or toaster? Because bread freezes very well, and if you buy a full loaf it's cheaper per serving.
I might be taking this too seriously, but I just started freezing bread in my 40's LOL (artisan bread). All you need is a bread knife and zip loc bags.
Big quality of life improvement. After you toast it, it's better than fresh. There is some science behind this that I don't remember.
Fascinating just to see the prices of bread in another country. In the Mumbai area, it looks like a half loaf costs between 17 and 75 INR -- with most around 22 INR, or 30 cents US. Here in Toronto, we often pay $4 to $5 (USD) for a decent loaf of sandwich bread. The difference is pretty striking.
I’ve seen the bread in most Asian countries. You get what you pay for. Only premium bread may be worth it, and still not on pair with cheap basic European bread.
Do you mean for baguette/loaf type breads? I lived in Turkey, and things like gevrek, simit, and pidesi were dirt cheap but clearly worth as much as any bread I've had elsewhere, and delicious.
I suspect that's mostly because Indian labour is much cheaper. Making a loaf of home-made bread uses about $0.30 CAD of flour, and yeast, salt and water don't add much to the cost.
(Edit:) Also of course anti-competitive behaviour by the bakery cartel drives up prices in Canada.
> The API used to call Dunzo is open but undocumented. So if someone from Dunzo is reading this, don't be sending take-down notices. This is a very niche and tiny thing and is unlikely to put any strain on your servers.
I see this as a free promo for Dunzo and hope it hasn't caused them too much trouble.
In Scotland, "half a loaf" means a loaf. That is, "half a loaf" means an entire loaf; a whole loaf. I once had this explained to me at greatly repetitive length by a drunk man with an incomprehensible Glasgow accent, so you can be sure it is true.
Was curious about the etymology so looked it up. Seems like half-loaf referred to the fact that it weighed 2 pounds, half the standard "quartern" 4lb round loaf which was typically sold in quarters.
I was once scolded by my uncle for improperly cutting half loaf of bread. I started cutting the bread and when I was in the middle of bread I stopped and cut perpendicularly, thus releasing my half loaf.
Apparently correct way is cutting at angle so that loaf became thin in the center of bread. This way whoever cut bread after me can decide if they want full or half. In my method there is a sudden step which forced you to first cut the leftover half.
Pretty much every convenience and supermarket in Japan sells half loafs (well, if a "standard" loaf is L=2, W=1, H=1 and a half loaf is L=1, W=1, H=1.)
The 1x1x1 "half" loaf is the standard size in Japan
For me, I crave bread, meaning if I buy the half loaf then I'd likely eat the entire thing in 1-2 days so I like being able to buy 2 slices and avoid the temptation to eat the 6 or so I would have had if I'd bought the half loaf
Also, it's common in Japan to be able to buy a loaf as to comes out of the oven. Bakeries all over Japan advertise at what times bread will be freshly backed.
Note: the fact that this size is ubiquitous in Japan also means the site is no really succeeding there. For example here's 7/11's bread
You know this is exactly how multi-billion companies are started. Such niches that seem so hyper focused that no one bothers to pay attention and before you know it. Boom! You are everywhere.
> I love bread but I don't want to be eating 20 slices in 3 days. It shouldn't be so hard to find half-loaves of bread. They should be available more abundantly.
Well market forces for half loaves can leave them with an oversupply, and it's a quickly deteriorating product, and a sale speeds up getting rid of that inventory. The only alternative is to perfectly predict the future.
I don't get it. If there are stores that sell half loaves of bread, can't you go to any of them and just buy half a loaf? Even if they don't have half ones, they will cut one into two halves, won't they? Otherwise, I don't see how they'd sell halves.
Around here, they are called “bachelor loafs”. Since my family doesn’t like wheat bread, I buy a bachelor loaf a week. Saves about a buck, but much less spoilage. I don’t eat enough bread for a full loaf a week and am too lazy to deal with frozen bread.
I usually only buy bread when I make soup or stew and it's rare that the whole loaf doesn't get eaten. And that's usually one of those La Brea or whatever 'artisanal' par-baked brand the grocery store carries.
I was expecting a US-only site, since I wouldn't expect something like this to be available globally available and usually no mention of the location means it's targeted towards the US.
Kinda refreshing to see an India-only service on the front page of HN.
But no, it only searches store inventories for half-loaves for sale.
I love the laser focus on half-loaves anyway.