Pitch

TODO

Problem

Canada wastes 46% of the food it produces. 41% of that waste is avoidable: 8.8 million tonnes a year, worth $58 billion.¹ The waste happens on both sides of the grocery checkout. Grocers pay for one side and households pay for the other.

Retail is 12% of Canada’s food waste.³ Households are 48% of the avoidable $58 billion.^1,12 Together, $35 billion a year, 23% of the $150 billion of food that enters grocers.¹³

Problem for grocers

A grocery store guesses how much fresh food a town will buy this week and stocks it before anyone buys anything. Whatever the town does not buy, the store throws out. Retail and distribution account for a third of Canada’s fresh food waste, mostly produce and meat.^3,4

US stores throw out 11–13% of the fresh produce they buy.⁵

The store lives on a 2–4% net margin of all sales.⁶

Problem for consumers

A household throws out $1,800 of avoidable food a year.¹ It does that while the grocery bill rises: a family of four spends $17,572 on food in 2026, $995 more than last year, and Dalhousie forecasts prices up another 4–6%.⁷

Stores sell food in sizes that do not match a meal. A recipe needs half a bunch of celery and the store sells a bunch. Package sizes and volume promotions push people to buy more than they will cook, and the leftover is what rots.⁸ Households that regularly throw out leftovers waste more than three times as much food as those that don’t, in US data.⁹

Planning and shopping take two to six hours a week in US surveys, depending on who you ask and whether they have kids.^10,11

Solution

Shop by meal, not by package.

This eliminates waste and creates value we can pass to the grocer and the consumer.

How it removes the waste

We portion each meal to its recipe. The customer buys what the recipe uses.

Portioning to the recipe removes the overbuying that package sizes force. Meal kits already do this: pre-portioned ingredients cut a meal’s food waste enough that the same meal bought at a grocery store has a 33% higher carbon footprint than the kit, packaging included.¹⁴ HelloFresh reports 82% less food waste than the 12 retailers it measured against, in its own study.¹⁵ App-based meal planning alone, with no portioning, cut household food waste 15–25% in a Philippines study.¹⁶

Meals chosen ahead give the store its order before it buys, so the weekly stock is what the town ordered.

The store sells stock that is about to turn as a meal instead of marking it down as an item. A 50%-off salmon fillet leaves the customer to buy the rest of the meal. A 50%-off salmon dinner, cook tonight, includes it. The store pushes the sale to the people who will eat it, and the item leaves the shelf with everything it needs to be cooked.

How it works

What the customer buys

• Meals. The ingredients for a meal, in the amounts the recipe uses. Each meal shows its price against the same ingredients bought as packages, and what that saves.
• Prepped. An add-on per meal: washed and chopped, ready to cook.
• Groceries. The rest of the basket, at shelf prices.

The trip

1. The customer downloads the app and picks their store.
2. They pick meals for the week from the store’s menu, or create one from a web page or a photo of a recipe. They can drop an ingredient they already have, or take the meal as groceries instead.
3. They add the rest of the groceries. The app remembers what they bought last time.
4. They choose a pickup slot, two or more days out, and order. They can change the order until it closes. We keep a card on file for no-shows and the container deposit.
5. Staff pick and portion each order from the store’s stock the morning of pickup.
6. They come to the store, take the containers with their name on them, and pay at the till with the rest of the shop, or in the app and walk out. Delivery is $8.
7. They bring the containers back on the next trip.

Markdown meals

Stock about to turn goes on the menu as a markdown meal, priced with the reduced item, for pickup today.

Year 1: delivery to short-term rentals

1. The guest orders meals for the stay before they leave home, and pays in the app with a delivery fee.
2. We deliver to the rental for the day they arrive.
3. We collect the containers when the rental turns over.

Market

The market is grocery spend. We take 12% of the spend that goes through Motherloaf, from the household, the store, and brands (Business Model).

Canada

TAM. 15.4M households¹² × $8,658 a year⁴⁴ = $133B a year.

SAM. Independents, where the owner can say yes to a counter in the store. The five national chains hold nearly 80% of sales,²⁰ so independents are about 20%: $27B a year across 3,142 stores.¹⁹

SOM. Stores signed by year 5 × spend through Motherloaf per store. A store has 980 households; 196 use the app and put 35% of their spend through it: $594k a store, $71k to us. Stores signed is set in Go to Market. TBD. 15 stores is $1M a year to us; 141 is $10M.

United States

TAM. Supermarket sales, $1T a year.²¹

SAM. Independents hold 38%: $354B a year²³ across 17,319 stores.

SOM. Same method. A US store does 2.3× a Canadian one, $163k to us. TBD.

First market

Ferraro Foods: two stores, Rossland and Trail, family-owned since 1943, 150 staff.²⁴ Rossland has 1,805 households at a median income of $96k; Trail has 3,736 dwellings at $68k.²⁵ Walmart is in Trail. Rossland has one grocery store.

Rossland has 108–129 short-term rental listings at 48–60% occupancy, 5.8 nights and $931 a stay, peaking in February.²⁶ That is 3,300–4,900 stays a year.

Competition

No one running today portions to order from a grocer’s own shelves. Each competitor does one piece of shop by meal and leaves the rest.

Meal kits

HelloFresh: $10–13 a serving plus $10 shipping in Canada.²⁸ 851M meals in 2025, revenue down 9%, North America down 13%.²⁹ About 90% of customers leave within a year.³⁰ Goodfood, the Canadian kit, had sales down 21% to $121M in fiscal 2025.³¹

They ship from a warehouse, so the grocer is cut out. The customer buys time and leaves.

In-store kits

Walmart put pre-packed kits in 2,000 stores in 2018 and discontinued them.³² Loblaw ended PC Chef in 2021.³³ Kroger’s Home Chef passed $1B a year in 2021, in 2,200 stores.³⁴

These are SKUs made centrally and put on a shelf. They need shelf life and add to what the store throws out.³⁵ None are ordered ahead or portioned from the store’s own stock.

Meal-planning apps

Plan to Eat, Paprika, AnyList, Samsung Food, Instacart’s shoppable recipes. Mealime, with 4.5M users, shuts down in October 2026.³⁶

They turn a recipe into a list of packages at package prices.

Waste apps

Flashfood saved shoppers $58M in 2025 across 900 Loblaw stores.³⁷ Too Good To Go has moved 8M meals in Canada since 2021.³⁸

They sell the surplus after the store over-ordered.

Click and collect

PC Express, Instacart, Voilà. Voilà cost Empire a $746M writedown in 2025.³⁹

They pick packages off the shelf at package prices.

Closest comparable

Meisterdish at Schnucks, St. Louis, 2019: kits assembled in-store from store stock, nine fixed options, grab-and-go or order-ahead. Repeat customers came twice a week. It paused when the pandemic closed counters.⁴⁰

It offered nine fixed meals and did not tell the store what to order.

Business Model

Shop by meal stops food being thrown out. We price so the household, the store, and we each keep some of what that saves.

Net new value, per household

A household spends $8,658 a year on groceries⁴⁴ and puts 35% of it through Motherloaf: $3,030, seven meals a week. 60% of those meals are portioned, so it covers 21% of the household’s spend, and covering 25% is enough to stop all of the $900 waste we target.

Pricing

A meal is the shelf price of each portion, plus the labour to portion it at 3× wage, plus a 10% service fee on everything through the app. Groceries are the store’s sale at the store’s price plus the same service fee. The app shows the meal against the same ingredients bought as packages; the difference is food the household no longer buys and throws out.

The store pays a platform fee of $2,000 a month and a 5% commission on spend through Motherloaf.

Brands pay 2.9% of sales through Motherloaf for placement, what they pay Instacart.⁴⁷

Who keeps what

Per household per year:

Per store

A store has 980 households (15.4M¹² across 15,708 stores¹⁹). 40% try the app and half of those are still using it at month 6: 196 households, $594k of spend through Motherloaf. The store keeps $33k on a net profit today of $190–380k.⁶ We take $71k. Households keep $69k.

What the grocer gets

Independents do 1.1% of sales online, and the online basket is three times the in-store one. ¹⁷ 77% name big-box competition as a top problem and 15% feel they compete well with it. 68% name inventory. ¹⁸

The platform is the online channel and the weekly meal order is the retention program and the demand signal.

Operations

In the store

A counter with a scale, a fridge for pickup, and a rack of reusable containers. Orders close two days before pickup. Staff pick the groceries and portion each meal from the store’s stock the morning of pickup, wash and chop the meals marked prepped, label each container with the customer’s name, and shelve it in the fridge. 10 seconds a serving to pick groceries, 10 to portion, 20 to chop: 12 seconds a serving across the mix.

The store posts stock about to turn as a markdown meal for same-day pickup. Markdown meals skip the two-day close.

Ordering

The store adds open meal orders to each produce and meat order.

Containers

Reusable. We hold a deposit on the card and release it on return. The store washes returns in its dish area.

Staff

Year 1, ours: one portioner per store at Ferraro’s, plus one driver for short-term rental delivery. After year 1, the store’s.

Software

The app, the store’s order list, and the monthly report. We host all three.

Go to Market

We sell to one grocer, write up the result, and pitch the next grocer with it.

Step 1: Ferraro’s

We staff the counter in both stores and charge nothing for three months. At three months we report store waste before and after, seconds a serving, households who tried the app and how many are still using it, and start charging the platform fee and commission. The targets are 40% tried and 50% still using at month 6.

We reach customers through signage at the entrance and the till, and the counter itself.

We reach short-term rental guests through a card in the unit and a line in the host’s booking message.

Step 2: the Kootenays

Castlegar, Nelson, and the other independents within an hour of Rossland. Same pitch, with the Ferraro’s report attached. We drive to the store, set up, and train their staff to portion.

Step 3: BC and Canada

The Canadian Federation of Independent Grocers represents 6,900 independent retailers.⁴¹ Its members and their wholesalers are the channel. Onboarding is remote: the app, a printed portioning guide, and a call.

Step 4: the United States

The National Grocers Association is the same channel for US independents.

What sets SOM

• Close rate. Stores that sign, out of stores pitched with the report.
• Sales capacity. Stores pitched per salesperson per year.
• Onboarding capacity. Stores stood up per month. After year 1 this is a software and support limit.

Stores signed by year 5 is close rate × stores pitched per salesperson per year × salespeople × years, capped by onboarding capacity.

Financials

TODO

Risks

TODO

Milestones

TODO