For most people, discarding unfinished cereal, unwanted bread crusts and unripe bananas is not ideal, but rather just the way the cookie crumbles.
However, one smart cookie from Dunedin stands firmly against that claim and has made a business out of her quest to create baked goods from everyday food scraps.
Regardless of what you might think of when you imagine the repurposed food scraps packed into Victoria Madison's compost cookies, the taste really does take the biscuit.
Ms Madison, from the Revival Food Company, takes waste products from other food vendors and transforms them into her own creations, which she sells at the Otago Farmers Market.
"I gather spent grains from Emerson's Brewery, cacao husks from Ocho and whey from Evensdale Cheese -- and then I get the ugly fruit and vegetables from other vendors at the market and I make product from it," she explains.
Ms Madison says while it minimises waste, it's also a very affordable way to run her company.
"It's a good business because my overheads are very low," she says.
"I'm getting stuff that's either free or very low cost because it's considered undesirable -- and then I'm able to create something beautiful and tasty out of it which I can then sell."
Ms Madison is a supporter of the Love Food Hate Waste campaign, which aims to reduce the amount of food households send to landfills each year.
According to the United Nations Environmental Programme, one third of food produced for human consumption is wasted.
Ms Madison is a firm believer there's no real excuse for not working food scraps into what you cook, regardless of if you fancy yourself as a chef or not.
"It's definitely not going to taste any worse [if you incorporate scraps] and you're definitely going to get that feel-good factor knowing you're using something that wouldn't otherwise be used," she says.
"Why throw it out when it's got another life?"
Where to store your food:
Food-saving tips from Kiwi families:
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