Reduce the amount of food waste by giving leftovers a second change.

In 2015, a group of friends in Denmark launched their app To Good To Go and saved its first meal in Copenhagen. The idea behind the app: reduce the food waste/leftover from restaurants and sell it cheaper instead to through it in the waste.”

Their first idea behind it, was to save the food waste at the end of the buffets, but during the developing of the concept they realized that they could include many more food service providers such as restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and hotels.

It is horrible that one third of all food produced are ended in the garbage. In the best approach it will be recycled or used as animal feed. At worst it lands on the landfill or incineration. To give you a short overview about the amount of food waste in the U.K., there are one million people dependent on emergency food packages. At the same time, the U.K. restaurant industry wastes each year around 600,000 tons of food. If you realize this, it is sad, and the worst thing it happens in many other cities too.

After 3,5 years they saved 29 million meals and saved the equivalent of more than 72,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. All these was only possible with the community of 18 million users and 38,000 restaurants, supermarkets, and cafes in 14 countries.

The socially innovation of the To Good To Go is that they created a platform, to reduce the food waste and offer a solution, where they can sell their leftovers. As I mention it in the beginning, the solution is App based, where you can choose your city district of interest, the type of meal and more. At the check-out, you pay directly and get the information about the pick-up time. It is a win-win-win situation because food waste is reduced, restaurants gain a new revenue stream, and they offer the leftover meals cheaper for students, people with a lower budget or people who want to reduce the amount of food waste.

This simple solution inspired me because it is important to stop the throwaway society in general. I share To Good To Go overall vision of “a planet with no food waste”. They have taken an important step in the right direction to achieve this goal, but we need to think about food waste at home, in supermarkets and other places. Because 28% of world´s farmland is used to produce food that is wasted.

The developers of To Good To Go have shown that they used the design thinking process to create a sustainable solution to a problem that affects the world and how easy it is to solve big problems like this. It’s incredible how quickly they’ve grown in the past few years, and shows that awareness of this issue is growing.