I came across Too Good To Go back in December of 2018, and have been the occasional happy user ever since. Then one day, it dawned on me:
Too Good To Go is the perfect way to grab a bite while travelling: It’s cheap, it’s locally delicious, and most of all: It’s environmentally friendly!
So I reached out to Too Good To Go’s Waste Warrior Marketing team, asking for an interview to bring you answers all the hottest questions. And they happily obliged. My Interview with Too Good To Go came to life, below.
Table of Contents
What is Too Good To Go
Your definition of Too Good To Go in one sentence?
Too Good To Go is the free app that lets you rescue delicious, unsold food from local stores at great prices so it doesn’t go to waste.
How Does it Work?
Take us through how the TGTG app works.
When you run a restaurant or food store, lots of things can cause you to waste food. Take bakeries as an example: they need to have plenty of bread available so customers don’t leave empty handed, but if they don’t predict demand perfectly (an extremely tricky thing to do) they’ll have bread left over. That bread won’t be fresh enough to sell the next day, so it ends up being thrown away.
Too Good To Go lets its users buy this unsold food for a great price so it doesn’t go to waste. Stores list a ‘Magic Bag’ of mystery food then users buy the Magic Bag via the app, and pick it up at a time specified by the store.
For users, it means they get an exciting and delicious surprise for a great price. For stores, it means they can recover costs, reduce food waste and meet new customers. For the environment, it means less food waste – and this is the main reason Too Good To Go exists.
At the moment, a third of food is wasted globally. When food decomposes it landfill, it produces methane – a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. But that’s not the only problem: when we waste food, we also waste all the resources that went into producing that food.
Combined, these factors mean that food waste contributes to 8% of greenhouse gases. It’s such a big deal, that climate expert Chad Frischmann has said that stopping food waste is one of the most important things we can do to reverse global warming.
By buying meals through Too Good To Go, not only do you get delicious food, but you do something that makes a real difference.
Locations Available Today
Where can we use TGTG today : e.g. current nbr. of cities per country. (understanding, of course, that you’re growing constantly)
Too Good To Go is currently in 12 countries – Germany, France, UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway and Austria.
The app can be used in any country we’re active in – it just depends how many stores are signed up in your particular city. Simply enable location settings on the app, and you’ll automatically see which stores have food up for grabs near you.
Expansion
How often/fast do you add new cities/countries? And where are you looking to launch next?
We want to combat as much food waste as possible, so that means launching in as many countries as we can. In 2019, so far, we’ve launched in Austria, Poland and Italy, and are looking forward to expanding into more countries in the near future.
Carbon Offset
How much does 20M meals actually mean, in carbon footprint offsetting?
20 million meals is equal to 50,000,000 kg of prevented C02 emissions – about the same as if you took 10,616 cars off the road for a year!
Some Surprising Findings
Give us some tasty TGTG stats – Something that surprised even your BI/ data scientists (such as your oldest user..)
The most surprising stat we’ve discovered isn’t directly to do with the app – it’s to do with eggs!
Recently we did some research which uncovered that the UK alone throws away 720 million eggs a year. Considering a carton of six eggs takes about five brimming bath tubs of water to produce, that’s an awful lot of waste.
A lot of it is down to lack of awareness around which eggs are and aren’t okay to eat, so we made a video to clear things up for people.
Too Good To Go – While Travelling
Do you know how many people use TGTG outside of their ‘home’ location (meaning, in a different city or country, etc). Basically, how many people use TGTG while traveling?
We don’t keep our users’ location information on file, so we can’t track this. But lots of our users share their rescues on social media, and many of them enjoy opening the app on holiday to see what delicious food they find.
Not only is it a great way to sample new restaurants in a new place, but it’s an excellent way of enjoying food on-the-go for a great price.
It also relieves a bit of the ‘what should I eat’ or ‘where should I eat’ decision fatigue that so often sets in while you’re travelling. The contents of your Magic Bag is a mystery, so you just get to sit back and enjoy the surprise.
Customer Experience
Though I imagine bad experiences are far and between, they still exist. Maybe companies abuse/bypass the rules. Maybe they’re giving away one single product valued at 3 eur instead of the 12eur value surprise pack that was advertised (this actually happened to me on my very first TGTG order – for 3 eur i got one single piece of pie – so I basically paid the full price of the pie. I didn’t call it quits though, and then realized it was just an isolated case) So how do you vet your partners, and how do you ensure a high level of customer service/satisfaction?
Too Good To Go’s on-boarding team is constantly improving its processes, so we can anticipate any issues and prevent problems before they happen. Before stores join up, we look closely at their existing food quality and customer service reputation. Stores then receive thorough training to make it easy for them to provide a great customer experience.
Our in-app rating system allows us to keep track of the user experience within each store, so if we get alerted to the fact that standards are slipping, we can quickly check in with the store and see what’s happening and how we can help.
Innovations
Can we have a glimpse at innovations to come? What should we expect next from TGTG
From the start, our mission has been the same: we want to inspire and empower everyone to take action against food waste.
The app prevents food from being wasted at the end of the supply chain. But retail/distribution waste only accounts for 13% of total wasted food, so there’s a limit to how much the app in its current form can achieve on its own. That’s why Too Good To Go’s ambitions extend beyond the app – we refer to this area as the ‘Movement’.
In France and Denmark, we’ve worked with manufacturers to help address the misunderstandings around date labeling (expiry dates are responsible for 10% of food waste in Europe). In a new approach to labeling by food manufacturers, the ‘best before’ date is now followed by a post face: ‘often good after’. The aim is to encourage consumers to look beyond the label and decide for themselves whether food is okay to eat.
Beyond examples like this, Too Good To Go’s ‘Movement’ ambitions outline four key areas where we can make an impact to prevent food waste.
By 2020, Too Good To Go aims to inspire 50,000,000 people, work with 75,000 businesses, impact regulation in five countries, and educate and inspire 500 schools.
By creating goals in these areas, we hope to create change in the respective food waste habits of each.
Future Growth
Acquisitions are also a great way to get into a new market, and Too Good To Go doesn’t shy away from growing the waste warriors family : We Save Eat in Spain recently joined the Too Good To Go. Although it has been in the market for only one year, We Save Eat already has 8000 subscribers, 27000 daily downloads and works with over 150 establishments, most of them located in Madrid and Barcelona.
Congratulations We Save Eat and Too Good To Go !
Useful Links
And thank you for accepting the interview, Too Good To Go! Keep on fighting the good fight – I’ll be rooting for you throughout my travels.
So if you want to join the food waste movement, download the app and start your own waste war in the 12 European countries that Too Good To Go is present in already.
Whether you’re living in /or travelling to these destinations: Germany, France, UK, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway and Austria, join the millions of Waste Warriors .
Too Good To Go Website
Twitter: @TooGoodToGo_UK
Instagram: @toogoodtogo.uk
Facebook: https://facebook.com/toogoodtogoUK/