The French-Israeli App Maker Tackling Food Waste

I meet Elie Fischer at Ca Phe Hanoi, a kosher Vietnamese restaurant in Tel Aviv, the brainchild of French restaurateurs Claude Louzon and Emmanuel Dayan. 

Fischer, who moved from his native Paris to Israel, is the director of Israel operations for Louzon and Dayan as well as the co-founder of the new app SpareEat that enables people to buy unsold food from restaurants.  

After graduating from college, Fischer spent a year and a half in finance and then did what he always wanted to do: quit his job and enrolled in the prestigious Swiss hospitality management institute, Gilon. 

After graduation, Fischer moved to India and worked in two of that country’s most luxurious hotels. He said he chose India “first to get as much cultural knowledge as possible; to be able to understand people. Second, for fun. This is an industry where I can travel and learn so much.”

While working in Bangalore — dubbed the Silicon Valley of India — he met one of the owners of the Israeli Dan Hotel Group. 

“As luck would have it, I saw a white guy in the middle of India,” Fischer said. “We were talking and quickly understood we were both Jewish.” 

Not long after, at the age of 27, Fischer moved to Israel to become the food and beverage director for Jerusalem’s renowned King David Hotel, favored by many visiting dignitaries. “I was very proud to be there,” Fischer said. “It’s this historic, prestigious, amazing place.” 

He added he was particularly proud of the coexistence, collegiality and respect among the hotel’s diverse staff. “It was very interesting, the mix between the Israeli, the Arab Muslim and Christian,” he said.  

“All of the food chain is connected. The less food waste you have, the less production you have, the more impact on prices.” 

It was his intimate knowledge of food and beverage operations that inspired him to make his next career move: co-founding SpareEat. Calling itself “quality food in a yummy eco spirit,” the app offers consumers up to 50% off grocery-, bakery- and restaurant-boxed items and meals at the end of the day that would otherwise be discarded. In the hotel and restaurant business, Fischer said, he “always saw the amount of food we throw away. The breakfast buffet for me was always painful, every morning. Something had to be done.”

So he teamed up with his cousin’s wife, Laetitia, who always has had what Fischer called a “strong ecological sensitivity.” Fischer and his partners invested heavily in the technology behind the app, with the goal of bringing it to international markets. They just licensed it in their first country: Turkey. 

“Israel wastes over a third of all food produced,” Fischer said but noted that it’s also a worldwide problem.  Scalability, he said, is key in addressing the massive failures of the global food system, which has brought on so much of our environmental crisis.  

“All of the food chain is connected,” Fischer said. “The less food waste you have, the less production you have, the more impact on prices.”