It started with one potato.

Not metaphorically. A real one. Slumped in the corner of a fridge, forgotten behind a bag of spinach. It wasn’t alone, either. Half an onion. Some mysterious sauce from two dinners ago. A carrot that definitely deserved better.

We didn’t set out to build an app for food waste. We just wanted to stop feeling like garbage about throwing away food.

Because here’s the truth: most food waste doesn’t happen in fields or factories. It happens at home. In kitchens like yours and ours, where life gets busy, plans change, groceries get ambitious, and leftovers disappear into the back of the fridge like doomed explorers.

Globally, households are responsible for 60% of all food waste. In the EU alone, that's 32 million tonnes per year, the equivalent of tossing out roughly 1 in every 5 grocery bags full of food bought at the store instead of eating it. And for 1–2 person households? The numbers are even worse. We waste twice as much per capita as bigger households. Not because we don’t care. But because most tools out there just weren’t built for how we actually live. Most meal planning apps assume you're cooking for four, ignore what’s already in your fridge, and can’t tell the difference between a 'best before' and a 'use by' date. They’re static, nutrition-focused, or filter-based, not designed to adapt to shifting schedules, random cravings, or that half-eaten burrito bowl you forgot you had. For one- to two-person households especially, the system just breaks: recipes are too big, packaging is too much, and leftovers go uneaten. These apps weren’t made to reduce waste — they were made to generate content.

So we built OH, a potato!

It started as a simple idea: what if your meal plan started with what you already had?

Now it’s a full-blown, weirdly motivating, AI-powered zero-waste app designed for real-life cooking, not food-magazine fantasy. Over 30,000 people use it to:

• Snap photos of their fridge and pantry

• Get personalized recipe suggestions based on what they already have

• Build automated, waste-reducing grocery lists

• Import recipes from anywhere (even that TikTok one without written steps)

• And grow a little digital potato pet to stick to planning

It’s not perfect. But it helps. OH, a potato! was named Product Hunt’s #1 Product of the Day, Week, and #1 AI Product, and it holds a 4.8-star rating on the App Store. Not bad for something that started with a potato. And Apple featured us as a top app in 32 countries.

But this is just the beginning.

The next version of OH, a potato! is going deeper. The app will:

• Understand what’s fresh, what’s fading, and what needs saving today

• Auto-adjust your plan when life throws curveballs (read: pizza nights)

• Learn your tastes, habits, and patterns without sending your data to the cloud

• Show exactly how much waste, money, and CO2 you’re saving in real time

It’s a system that gets smarter every week, just by using it. Not to make you feel guilty, but to help you feel a little more in control. A little more hopeful. Like maybe the future is still edible.

We know the climate crisis is overwhelming. But food waste is one place we can actually make a dent, starting now, with what’s already in our fridge.

So yeah. It started with one mushy potato.

And it turned into this.

Join the zero-waste movement and download the app.

Dalma & Radu