FOODIES can grab restaurant-standard grub for half price thanks to a new app.

Online food marketplace Karma, which has launched in Brighton, lets restaurants sell food that would otherwise be thrown away.

Customers can buy premium fare for a minimum 50 per cent discount from dozens of the city’s eateries.

Though Karma was founded in Sweden, Brighton is only the second city in the UK where the app has been launched

Founder Hjalmar Ståhlberg Nordegren said the app was “win-win” for companies and customers.

“It’s a great deal for both sides,” the 30-year-old said. “Restaurants get money from food they would have to waste and people get to save money on delicious food.

“The best thing is you can start saving immediately, if you use Karma regularly you can save £40 or £50 per week on great food.”

But when Karma was founded three years ago in the Swedish capital, it looked quite different.

“We started out making a general deals platform because we all agreed that everyone loves a good deal,” Hjalmar said. “We used it for sales but there was so much on the app, it was cluttered. Eventually we got to a situation where we decided we needed to focus on one specific thing.”

Hjalmar and the team realised some Stockholm restaurants were using the app to sell their surplus food.

“We thought that was such a good idea,” he said. “It’s food that’s way better than anything in your fridge, but cheap. We thought ‘If these guys had that problem, then everyone else must have had that problem’.”

The idea for Karma was born. Hjalmar made it the company’s mission to conserve as much food as possible.

“It was so eye-opening to find out how much food is wasted in the world”, he said.

“Globally, one-third of all food is wasted. That’s 1.3 billion tonnes per year. We’re overproducing like crazy.

“There’s all this talk of producing food sustainably because cows produce too much methane and certain crops can damage the environment. But if we can’t even conserve what we produce then that’s a problem we need to tackle.”

Three years and 150 cities and towns later, Karma has rescued 295 tonnes of food from being thrown away. The company’s expansion into Brighton was an obvious next step, said Hjalmar.

“We were in a meeting in London deciding what we should do next,” he said.

“Someone just mentioned Brighton and we immediately all said yes.

“It was in the back of everybody’s heads. There was no debate.”

So Hjalmar visited Brighton for the first time last month and scouted out the city’s scene.

The Karma team toured Brighton’s restaurants, including Barney’s Deli and Shogun Ramen.

“Maybe I’m biased because I was only there to eat, but everything was fantastic here,” Hjalmar said.

“Every day on the app I got notifications that another restaurant had joined.”