Basoli Dhirai.
Turning waste into opportunity
An innovation project on sustainability, with an open question at its centre: where, in everything the platform touches, could doing good become a genuine opportunity?
The problem
One open question
Talabat set up an innovation project around sustainability, an open look at where, in everything the platform touches, a genuine opportunity might sit. And leading it meant deciding where to look first.
Any direction worth committing to had to work for three parties
at once : the business, its restaurant partners, and
its customers.
So discovery started where all three meet - food, and what happens to it at the end of the day.
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The story of surplus
Discovery began with the restaurant partners, because nobody understands food waste better than the people absorbing its cost every day.
What did sustainability mean inside their operation? Where was food actually being lost, and what did it cost? Where did they have genuine appetite to act?
The answers reframed the project. Waste meant something different in every kitchen. What they shared was the loss itself : good food, made and paid for, going out unsold at the end of every day.
Most were open to recovering some of that value, but how, and how visibly, was a brand decision. What read as smart value for one would read as a step down for another. Any solution had to flex around that. Whether one could was now a question for the customer.
How the idea held up with real customers.
Users came next, to show us how they actually weighed a discounted plate of surplus food, once it was in front of them rather than in a survey question about values.
The interest was real, and it had edges. What people would buy this way, from whom, on what terms, and when, all of it had clear boundaries, and they differed by who was ordering and what was on the plate. That precision was the finding - clear boundaries are something you can design a proposition around.
By the end, both sides of the market were looking at the same opportunity, each from their own direction.
[ 02 / APPROACH ]
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Proof before product
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What discovery delivered
A validated opportunity — proven on both sides of the market, with the evidence behind it and a clear enough shape for the business to commit with confidence.
The project could have started with a build: pick a direction, ship something, learn from what happens. Instead, the learning came first. By the time anyone talked about building, the opportunity was already proven — before a single engineer was pulled in.
The most useful thing on the table wasn't a prototype. It was proof.
Impact
By balancing user flexibility with vendor protection, the project created a sustainable ecosystem where conversion rates remained stable while losses plummeted.
01 / INITIAL MAPPING
02 / LOGISTICAL FLOW
03 / SYSTEM INTEGRATION