Food waste sucks. There are plenty of stores out there that end up making more food than they can sell, and there are even times when they have to prepare food for an order that will later get cancelled. That food that’s left over is still too good to be thrown away… so why not sell it even at a reduced price? Wouldn’t that be worth it?
And well, that’s what Too Good To Go is. It’s an app where I’ve been sporadically ordering food for pick-up. I then go to the corresponding store, typically bakeries in my case, and get a surprise bag with a bunch of goodies inside, from bread and croissants to cake and sausage rolls. All sorts of stuff.
It’s amazing.
What I really appreciate about the app is mostly the money I can save through it. Over here in my city, there’s this bakery/shop called “BackWerk” which sells baked goods of all kinds. I’ve been grabbing surprise bags over there quite frequently over the past few months and they’re full of value, really. They are priced at 4€ but I know for a fact that they’d easily amount to at least 20€ worth of baked goods if I were to purchase them as is.
When I was a waiter, we had times when people decided to change their order at the very last minute. It’s something we’d accommodate and I’d often end up taking it back to the kitchen and just packing it up to eat it after my shift. Sometimes, however, people would come in and we’d ask if they’d be down to eat that for cheaper. We’d do that only with people we knew. They’d often be very happy to do so and since they didn’t get to choose their meal, we’d essentially offer it at a discount. I think this is similar to that.
Anyway, across 10 bags picked up through the app, I saved 96€ which is pretty amazing. Your mileage may wary though depending on the shop you order from. Yesterday, I grabbed something from a sushi place and quite honestly I felt a tad scammed with the amount of food I got. Another time, a while ago, I grabbed something from it and actually got sick from it – after which the support gave me a refund, at least.
The app will also tell you how much CO2e you’ve saved through this. In my case, I’ve saved about 115 kWh of electricity on the European grid, 7176 full smartphone charges worth of energy, the energy required for 120 cups of hot coffee or the equivalent of 103 minutes spent hot showering, heated by an electric boiler using a normal showerhead. My avoided CO2 emissions amount to 33kg of CO2.
These comparisons put it really into perspective how important it is to not waste food.
As I mentioned, it can be hit or miss, although that depends on the place you go to. Also, it might not be available in every city that you reside in and you don’t know what you’ll get either, so there’s that. Aside from that, these surprise bags aren’t as frequently available as you might expect, and as such you cannot just live off of it… but it’s always nice whenever I see that it’s there.
If you had a negative experience with a store, feel free to leave a negative review there. If you had a good experience with one, like I did quite frequently, a positive review makes it so that more people can appreciate the goods from that place.
Overall, I think the app is pretty great and I do think more people should check it out. Too Good To Go is pretty darn great and I’d love it if more people could be mindful of their food wasting habits and/or help save more emissions this way.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
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