Free — the whole product, no account needed to try

Your kitchen already paid for the food it threw away.

A food waste log for independent restaurants. Record what goes in the bin, see what it cost you, and get the one-page record your hauler or city inspector keeps asking for.

No install. Works on the phone already in your apron. Data stays in the browser.

4–10%
of food purchased by a typical restaurant ends up as waste
~15 sec
to log one loss, from the line
$0
forever. No card field, no trial countdown
The problem

Nobody steals from your kitchen. It walks out in the trash.

You know your labour cost to the tenth of a percent. You can quote your prime cost from memory. But the food you bought and did not sell? That number is usually invisible — not because it is small, but because nothing forces it onto a spreadsheet.

The arithmetic: a restaurant doing $900k a year at 30% food cost spends $270k on food. Waste of 4% is $10,800 a year — roughly one full-time line cook, gone.
  • 01
    The clipboard by the back door
    It gets filled in for two weeks, then stops. Even when it is filled in, nobody totals it, so it changes nothing.
  • 02
    Spoilage hides inside your food cost variance
    The invoice says you bought it. The POS says you sold it. The gap between them also contains over-portioning, theft and miscounts — so you cannot see which is which.
  • 03
    Organics rules are arriving everywhere
    California, Washington, Massachusetts, Vermont, New York City, Ontario and more now require commercial food-waste separation. Inspectors ask for a record. Most independents do not have one.
  • 04
    Spreadsheets die when the manager leaves
    A file on one laptop, owned by one person, with no backup, is not a record. It is a rumour.
How it works

Three steps, none of them a new job.

The whole point is that a line cook can do this with one wet hand at 10:40pm.

STEP 01

Log it as you bin it

Item, quantity, unit cost, reason. Four fields. If you already know the invoice price, it remembers it next time.

STEP 02

See the number on Monday

Cost per day, cost per reason, and the one item that is quietly costing you most. Not a dashboard you have to interpret — a sentence you can act on.

STEP 03

Hand over the record

Print or export a one-page record: totals, breakdown by reason and category, signature line. CSV for your bookkeeper.

Cost, not just weight

Weight tells you the bin is full. Cost tells you which line to fix. Every entry is priced from your own unit cost.

Patterns, not charts to stare at

It names the worst item, the heaviest weekday and the dominant reason — in plain English, from your own entries.

A record that survives turnover

Store it, export it, print it. When the manager who kept the clipboard leaves, the history stays.

Compliance, without the consultant

When someone asks for your waste record, you should have it in two clicks.

Commercial organics separation rules have spread from a handful of cities to whole states and provinces. The rules differ, the enforcement differs, but the record they ask for looks the same everywhere: how much organic waste, over what period, and who signed for it.

Period totals
Cost and estimated weight, per location, any date range
Breakdown
By disposal reason and by food category
Method statement
How figures were captured, stated on the page
Signed page
Print to PDF with a signature and date block
Free

It is free. Not free-trial, not free-until-we-call-you.

Every feature, no seat limit, no card field anywhere in the signup form. This is a small independent tool with no sales team to pay for — so there is nothing to charge you for.

Everything
Whole product
No tiers, no feature gates.
$0forever
No account required to try it
  • Unlimited entries, unlimited locations
  • Overview, chart and pattern insights
  • Printable compliance report
  • CSV and JSON export, always
  • Custom categories and reasons
What it actually costs to run
Full transparency, because "free" usually hides something.
$0/ month, currently
No server, no database, no subscriptions
  • Static hosting: free tier
  • Your data stays in your browser, so we store nothing
  • No analytics, no ad network, no data resale
  • If a future version needs a server, it will be a separate opt-in — never a surprise charge here
What free does not include
Being straight about the limits beats discovering them later.
—by design
Not missing features. Different architecture.
  • No cloud sync between devices yet
  • No shared staff logins yet
  • Clearing browser data erases your entries — export first
Tell us what is missing
No card field exists No trial countdown Export any time No sales call
Questions

Things restaurant owners actually ask.

Is this a record an inspector will accept?

It is a self-reported internal log, and it is built to look like what inspectors and haulers ask for: period dates, total volume, breakdown, method statement, signature line. Whether a specific jurisdiction accepts it depends on that jurisdiction's rules.

We do not claim approval from any agency, and we are not affiliated with one. Treat this as the record you would have kept anyway, made legible and printable.

Where is my data stored?

In this version, in your browser's local storage on the device you are using. Nothing is uploaded to a server, which also means nothing syncs between devices and clearing your browser data erases it.

That is a deliberate trade: you can evaluate it with real numbers without handing over a customer list. Export to CSV or JSON before you clear anything. Multi-device sync would require a server and is not built yet.

How do you estimate weight if I only enter pounds or cases?

Standard kitchen conversion factors: pounds and kilograms directly, ounces at 28.35 g, gallons at 3.79 L. "Each", "case" and "batch" use rough averages, so treat the weight figure as an estimate and the cost figure as the reliable one.

Do I have to change how my kitchen runs?

No. Keep the clipboard if you want. The only change is that the thing you were already noting gets priced and totalled, once a week, in one place. If it takes more than two minutes a shift, it will not survive — so it is built to take less.

Is it really going to stay free?

Yes. There is no payment system connected to this site at all — no card field, no billing code, no account upgrade path. It runs on free static hosting, and your data never leaves your browser, so there is no server bill to recover from you.

If a future version adds multi-device sync, that needs a server, and it would be offered as a separate product with its own clear terms. It will not be bolted onto this one behind a paywall.

Who runs this?

A small independent software project. refood.com is not affiliated with any food-rescue charity, waste-collection company or investment fund that happens to share a similar name, and no food products are sold here. If you arrived looking for one of those, check your spelling — and if you have a question for us, write to hello@refood.com.