Rescuing Meals: How Yindii App Turned Surplus into Supper

The regional app is quietly changing how Southeast Asia eats, saves, and thinks about food waste

In a region where the cost of living is climbing as quickly as food waste piles up, solutions that feel both practical and hopeful are rare. One of the quiet standouts in 2025 came from Yindii, a regional food-

surplus app that has spent the year doing something deceptively simple: making it easier to save good food from being thrown away.

Founded in 2020 by Louis-Alban Batard-Dupré and Mahima Rajangam Natarajan, Yindii connects restaurants, bakeries, grocers, and hotels with diners willing to collect end-of-day surplus at a steep discount. The appeal is immediate—50 to 80 percent off for a “Surprise Bag” of perfectly edible food—but the impact adds up quickly. By the end of 2025, the community had saved more than half a million meals across Thailand, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

That figure translates into more than feel-good math. Rescuing those meals offset an estimated 1,375 tons of CO₂ emissions—roughly the equivalent of driving a petrol car around the world hundreds of times over, or burning more than half a million liters of fuel. It is the kind of climate win that comes not from futuristic tech, but from rethinking habits at closing time.

Bangkok has become one of Yindii’s most active testing grounds. Over the past year, more than 230,000 surplus meals were listed in the city alone, supported by 100,000-plus app installs and around 400 partner businesses. For users, that translated into real savings—over THB 4 million collectively—while more than 20,000 kilograms of food avoided the bin.

For businesses, the shift has been equally tangible. What used to be an unavoidable end-of-day loss has turned into a modest but meaningful revenue stream. Across the region, more than USD 2.5 million has flowed back to partner kitchens instead of into waste disposal. Some brands in Thailand are now preventing 70 to 90 percent of their daily surplus, a figure that would have seemed unrealistic just a few years ago.

One of the most interesting developments in 2025 was Yindii’s move beyond cafés and bakeries into the hotel world—a sector notorious for buffet-line excess. More than 50 hotels in Thailand joined the platform, experimenting with new ways to handle surplus from breakfast spreads and banquets. At The Okura Prestige Bangkok, a “Fill & Go” pilot allowed guests to choose items in person rather than receiving a pre-packed bag, signaling how flexible the model can be when hospitality teams lean in.

Mahima Rajangam Natarajan describes the work less as a tech play and more as a mindset shift. Every rescued meal, she says, proves that sustainability and affordability do not have to be opposing goals. Families, students, and office workers discover new neighborhood favorites at lower prices, while kitchen teams see surplus transformed from a source of guilt into one of pride.

Recognition has followed. In Hong Kong, Yindii was named a finalist in the Spirit of Hong Kong Awards for its approach to tackling food waste. In Singapore, the company used Impact Week at ONE to host the Yindii Eco-Brand Awards, spotlighting 25 brands and media partners committed to waste reduction. During the event, Singapore parliamentary leaders underscored a sobering fact: the city-state wastes around 800,000 tons of food each year, making surplus management not just an environmental issue but a matter of food security.

Five years after its launch, Yindii now counts more than 700,000 registered “food heroes,” nearly a million meals rescued, and over 2,250 tons of CO₂ emissions avoided. Looking ahead to 2026, expansion into new cities—including South Korea—is on the horizon. But the core idea remains unchanged: treat surplus not as failure, but as opportunity.

In a food culture that prizes abundance, Yindii’s biggest achievement may be cultural rather than numerical. It has made saving leftovers feel less like sacrifice and more like a small daily win—for wallets, for businesses, and for the planet.

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