Too Good To Go is the easy way to sell your surplus, unsold food. It’s a free app, with more than 2.8 million UK users ready to save something delicious. By partnering with Too Good To Go, you can attract new customers, recover sunk costs and make sure your food gets eaten, not wasted.
The concept is simple. As a business, you simply update the app to show how much surplus food you have to sell. Customers search the app for local stores, purchase the food via the app, then collect it at the time you set. Rather than listing individual portions of food, you’ll fill a ‘Magic Bag’ with food that hasn’t sold in time, setting a reduced price that’s fair for you and the customer.
The best part? Every meal you save helps the planet, too.
Did you know that even if a store saves 1 meal per day for a year, that’s the equivalent of 9 return car trips from London to Manchester in carbon emissions? Of heating up 19,000 cups of tea? Of chilling 2,700 bottles of beer? Or even 2 years of TV screen use?
It’s a win-win-win.
Too Good To Go has an ambitious goal: to inspire and empower everyone to fight food waste, while proving that it’s possible for businesses to thrive with social good at their core.
The problem is simple: too much food is being thrown away. It happens at stores and restaurants everywhere, from fresh sandwiches sitting in rubbish bags behind cafes, to steaming trays of untouched buffet fare being tipped directly into bins. It’s all delicious, made to be enjoyed – but it’s getting wasted instead.
At the same time, food waste is putting the planet under enormous strain. Entire forests are cleared to grow produce that will never be eaten, and scientists have discovered how food releases harmful greenhouse gases when it’s disposed of unsustainably.
It raises the discussion: if our food is putting the planet under so much strain, why are we throwing so much of it away?
That’s the question several entrepreneurs around Europe – from Paris to Copenhagen to Leeds – were asking when, in 2016, they joined forces to create Too Good To Go.
It’s a free app that people can use to buy unsold food that would otherwise be wasted. Users get delicious meals at a great price, businesses recover costs, and the planet has less wasted food to deal with – it’s a win-win-win.
At Too Good To Go, we believe that sustainable options should be easy and fun. They should make the planet a happier place, and they should be accessible to everyone.
We also believe that, despite how big and complicated it is, food waste is a problem we can solve together. That’s why we’re working with changemakers across society – from politicians to school children – to drive a movement that puts an end to the world’s most senseless problem.
A planet with no food waste is a better place to be. And together, we can make it happen.
Too Good To Go is a free app that enables you to sell surplus food to nearby users. You simply update the app to show how much surplus food you have to sell for customers to buy it. Customers search the app for local stores, purchase the food via the app, then collect it at the time you set. Rather than listing individual portions of food, you’ll fill a ‘Magic Bag’ with food that hasn’t sold in time.
Users will pay through the app, and turn up at the set time to pick up the food. It’s a win-win-win: your surplus gets eaten instead of wasted, the planet has less food waste on its plate, and the user gets delicious food for a great price.
Check out this video where the concept is explained in further detail:
Watch the videoA Magic Bag is what a customer can buy on the Too Good To Go platform. As most stores are not able to specify exactly what will be left at the end of the day, they do not specify exactly what the contents of the Magic Bag(s) will be. The contents will vary from day to day and always be a surprise to the customer.
The customers can collect their reservation within the collection time specified on the Too Good To Go app. Usually the collection time is just around closing time, but it varies from store to store. Should it be necessary to change the collection time, this can be done in MyStore. MyStore is a section of the app that businesses have exclusive control over where they control how much surplus stock they have left over.
All payments are processed through the Too Good To Go app. This makes the payment process easier and faster for both customers and you as a store.
Should the customer enquire about allergens when collecting their Magic Bag(s), you are obliged to give them this information. In fact, it’s best practice to offer up this information. If the customer does not wish to accept the Magic Bag(s) based on this information, they have the right to refuse the bag. In such a case, the customer has to contact Too Good To Go through the app, and we will make sure the customer is refunded.
MyStore is the tool that allows you as a store to control the Magic Bag(s) for reservation in the Too Good To Go app daily. MyStore further allows you to see the active reservations, register Special Days, download financial documents and read store-specific statistics and ratings.
Too Good To Go is on a mission to inspire and empower everyone to fight food waste. In the UK over 2 million bags and boxes of food have been saved to date through the Too Good To Go app, preventing 5 million kg of CO2 emissions.
To put this into perspective, the CO2 avoided is equivalent to that emitted by 984 flights around the world.
Too Good To Go is part of the Courtauld Commitment 2025, which brings together leading organisations working towards the UN’s goal of halving food waste by 2030. It has also committed to the WRAP Food Waste Reduction Roadmap, which aims to reduce business food waste in the UK, as well as signing the Step Up to the Plate pledge launched by the UK Government’s Food Surplus and Waste Champion, Ben Elliot.
Each saved meal means that less CO2 is released into our environment. When food ends up in landfill to decompose or is incinerated in furnaces, a huge amount of greenhouse gas is released, which will harm the atmosphere and lead to climate change.
On top of that we have launched a global food waste movement where we are trying to impact four basic pillars of society: households, business, education and politics.
You’ve heard about the problem of single use plastics, but what about the impact food waste has on our environment?
Food waste globally generates about 8-10% of GHG emissions every year. To put that into perspective, if food waste were a country, it would be the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, surpassed only by the United States and China. In fact, the total contribution of food-waste-related emissions to global warming is almost equivalent to that of global road transport emissions.
With 69% of Brits being unaware of the correlation between food waste and climate change, it’s hardly surprising that so much food is wasted in Britain.
In the UK alone, over 10 million tonnes of food is thrown away each year and WRAP estimates that almost 3.5 million tonnes of this comes from the hospitality industry.
Yet, only ⅕ of the food wasted in the UK is truly unavoidable. So, if we rescued all wasted food in the UK for a year, we would prevent 20 million tonnes of CO2.
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