Say Goodbye to Food Waste with Too Good To Go App
A few months ago, anyone in Memphis with the Too Good to Go app on their phones knew there was no point in opening it up. All they’d see was a sad, empty map. That’s because the trendy service — which partners with restaurants and shops to offer bargain “surprise bags” of excess food to customers — hadn’t made its way to this part of the world yet.
A few months ago, anyone in Memphis with the Too Good to Go app on their phones knew there was no point in opening it up. All they’d see was a sad, empty map. That’s because the trendy service — which partners with restaurants and shops to offer bargain “surprise bags” of excess food to customers — hadn’t made its way to this part of the world yet.
So while Chicago was developing a Too Good to Go “community,” New Yorkers were hosting Too Good to Go-fueled dinners, and a London writer for Wired was dining on surprise bags for a week, we were just left feeling hungry.
But then, something good happened. Something TOO good. Memphis had surprise bags!
They popped up in an odd collection of places. First came Whole Foods and IKEA. Then dozens of Circle K locations populated the app. And just about a week ago, Krispy Kreme joined in on the action. The result is a pretty solid array of options scattered around the region.
But it’s going to get even better, says Sarah Soteroff, Too Good to Go’s senior PR manager for the U.S. and Canada. What we’re seeing so far are just national and international partnerships. The app has plans to officially launch in Memphis next year as part of a full U.S. rollout, which will mean sending in salespeople to get a lot more local businesses on board — and raising awareness generally that this is a thing that exists. “If people don’t know about it, no one will pick up food,” she says.
When people know about Too Good to Go, that hasn’t been a problem. The app launched in Denmark in 2016, and has quickly expanded across Europe, jumped over to North America and Australia, and developed a huge customer base. According to the company, there are more than 100 million users and 170,000 business partners, and altogether, they’ve saved 350 million meals from being trashed.
“Our dream is a world with no food waste,” explains Soteroff, who notes that 40 percent of our food supply is typically destined for the dump. Their pitch to businesses is that they can recoup revenue by offloading whatever they have left at the end of the day in these surprise bags. For customers, they sweeten the deal by setting the price at about a third of what the items would normally cost (bags are usually between $3.99 and $9.99, plus tax). There’s only one catch: You can’t be picky. You have some sense of what’s coming based on what the business sells, but beyond that, it truly is a surprise.
My family moved to Memphis in August from D.C., which has been a Too Good to Go market for over two years, and I had become kind of an aficionado. I’d regularly collect bags stuffed with croissants and muffins, pizza slices, and ripe produce. Every time, it was a bit like scratching a lottery ticket, but more delicious. Sometimes I ended up with weirdly large quantities of things (like six baguettes, or four massive bags of BBQ potato chips), or things I didn’t particularly want to eat (I’m a vegetarian), but I always had friends or family members willing to pitch in. After all, who doesn’t want to help the environment by snacking?
The number of available bags can vary depending on the day, and the pick-up windows can shift too, making the whole endeavor feel kind of like a game. Although you can search Reddit for tricks to up your chances of nabbing a particularly coveted bag, Soteroff says there’s no real need for strategy. “Food waste is unpredictable. That’s the reason we have surprise bags,” she says. “They don’t know what they’ll have.”
Her advice is to keep opening the app. You can also choose favorites, and set your filters to search for particular pick-up windows. If you miss out one day, there’s always another chance.
People’s habits and preferred cuisine are different wherever you go, so Soteroff says only time will tell what the Memphis market will eventually offer. While we’re waiting, it can be fun to use Too Good to Go over your holiday travels as a way to explore. I’ve picked up pastries in Italy, an entire apple strudel in Germany, and a large container of egg salad in New York.
But, of course, you can be an early adopter here. When I saw that a Circle K near me had appeared on the Memphis map, I was psyched to reserve a bag for $3.99. I went for it, and then went to the store, where the clerk at the counter looked confused. He called over his boss, who also looked confused until she called a supervisor. A minute later, I was holding a bag filled with a chicken sandwich, three apples, a fruit cup, and a hunk of chocolate cake — and explaining how to use the app to everyone in the store.
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