Would you buy unsold, leftover food from a restaurant for a discounted price?
This question is what spurred a Copenhagen-based company to develop Too Good To Go, an app that aims to reduce commercial food waste.
In Toronto, app users can acquire leftover food from grocery stores like Metro and Eataly, convenience stores like 7-Eleven and Circle K, chain restaurants like Tim Hortons and Ali Baba's, as well as popular independent businesses like the The Drake and Mabel's.
A customer can pre-purchase a "surprise bag" on the app — most go for less that $8 — then pick up the food during a designated time window either later that day or the next. In some cases, the bag is available immediately.
Too Good To Go entered the Canadian market in 2021, launching first in Toronto, before expanding to Montreal and Vancouver, and eventually the rest of the country. It also operates in 18 other countries across Europe and North America.
Founders wanted to find a way for restaurants and stores to “give away” perishable food items left unsold by closing time, while still allowing businesses to make a little bit of money, according to Sarah Soteroff, Too Good To Go’s senior public relations manager.
“Our founders watched grocery stores throw out food at the end of the day. They literally went dumpster diving and would find foods that were perfectly well packaged and hadn’t been opened,” she explained.
Rules regarding best before dates mean many stores toss out food items that are still edible but are no longer at peak freshness, Soteroff said.
She acknowledged the app’s ethos is marketing “not-quite fresh” food to customers, but said that’s the point. She pointed to the amount of food wasted in Canada every year.
“We know that food waste is a problem in Canada. Forty-six per cent of all food that we produce in the country goes to waste,” she said.
In terms of the monetary loss associated with food waste, the City of Toronto reports the average Canadian household throws away over $1,300 worth of food a year.
“Our goal is really to find a solution to [food waste] and make people feel like they're part of the solution. We never want to shame anybody for having food waste. We know that it's part of business,” Soteroff said.
When Too Good To Go expanded into Canada three years ago, it promised a discount of two-thirds off of retail prices for surprise bags. These bags contain a random assortment of food from the store or grocer, and are often categorized and sold by type, like baked goods or produce.
In a Reddit discussion from January, a moderator of the r/TooGoodToGoCanada subreddit posted a poll asking users if they would still buy surprise bags from retailers if prices rose to one-half of the original price.
Eighty per cent voted no.
Too Good To Go’s website already advertises customers can “enjoy food at 1/2 price or less.”
Daphne Yang, who has used the app on occasion, said they noticed restaurant and bakery foods going up in price on Too Good To Go, from one-third of the retail value, to half or greater.
To Yang, “it’s not a huge discount for end-of-day food.”
The only upside of using Too Good To Go, according to Yang, is when “trying businesses that I haven’t tried or otherwise wouldn’t try.”
Another customer, who has infrequently placed orders on the app, said the food items she received from a bakery were stale.
“I only got it twice and I was kind of disappointed with what I got and didn't end up using a whole lot of it,” said Alysia Lousie.
Although Soteroff claimed Too Good To Go has saved over six million meals and has more than 13,000 partners across Canada, some of its partners may save more meals than others.
Evans, who asked TorontoToday not to publish his full name, is a deli employee at a large Canadian grocery chain that partners with Too Good To Go. He admitted that few people seem to know about the app at his location, let alone use it frequently.
“My experience with [the app] is that the customers who are aware of the system and use it enjoy it, but it's also not advertised that well,” Evans said. “A lot of people don't even know it's a thing.”
He said the grocery chain he works for seems comfortable with the large amounts of food waste it's producing and is “unwilling to put in the manpower needed to make something like this effective.”
As for the future of Too Good To Go, Soteroff said the company is launching two new features to further reduce food waste. The first being a dynamic pricing scale, which means “the closer it gets to the end of a business day, the more you’ll see an even steeper discount.”
The second will be a parcel-focused program where customers can buy boxes of imperfect fruits and vegetables. She described the initiative as something “you could subscribe to and then get a delivery of your favourite fruits and veggies.”
“They just might not be the prettiest apple or the most round orange, but are still perfectly safe to eat and perfectly good surplus,” Soteroff said.
