At the end of the business day, a bakery may have a few leftover cupcakes, or a market may have made more boxes of fresh sushi than what was sold earlier at lunch. A food bank likely wouldn’t make the trip for such a small amount of food, so instead of going to someone in need, those items get tossed in the trash. But with the app Too Good To Go, you can reserve a “surprise bag” from one of those restaurants, and get whatever would have been thrown away at the end of the day for a discounted price.
In the U.S., between 30% and 40% of all food produced is wasted. Not only does that food get sent to landfill when it could have gone to a person, but also that food waste releases significant levels of methane into the atmosphere as it decomposes. Globally, food waste generates 8% of all greenhouse gas emissions. “We wanted to find a simple solution,” says Lucie Basch, cofounder of Too Good To Go, the winner of the apps category of Fast Company’s 2021 World Changing Ideas awards.
Unlike other food-waste saving apps that list specific menu items a customer can save from the trash, Too Good To Go’s simplicity is that you just get a grab bag of whatever the restaurant or store has on hand. A store may never know what items are destined for landfill at the end of the day, but packing any of those items into a one-price surprise bag for customers, Basch says, “is as simple as throwing away food.”
The app is now available in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, and will launch in San Francisco; Seattle; and Portland, Oregon before the summer. Basch says they plan to be in 10 U.S. cities by the end of 2021. “We think we can save more than 2 million meals from the trash in the U.S. in 2021 already,” she says. “That’s thousands of tons of emissions avoided.”