Too Good To Go — The zero waste app

Elisa Nève
Design Thinking for Social Innovation
2 min readFeb 5, 2023

Launched in 2015 Denmark by 5 entrepreneurs and very quickly expanded in Europe with the addition of a 6th member to the team, Too Good To Go is a zero waste app that aims to reduce food waste mostly among restaurants, food shops and bakeries.

In a context where 1/3 of food is being wasted worldwide, the young entrepreneurs decided it was time to change our consuming habits and deal with this huge problem. According to European Consilium, 87,6 tons of foodstuffs are being wasted every year in Europe for several reasons. Too Good To Go is a mobile app that connects food traders with consumers and aims to take part of this issue by reducing food waste worldwide.

©Too Good To Go

How does it work?

Everyday, each store that is part of the move provide x number of food baskets they will not be able to sell the next day. For example; Bakeries sell their freshly baked pastries and breads that cannot be sold the next day, supermarkets sell baskets full of all kind of products whose expiry date is very close, but are actually still edible for a few days.

This means that the products must be consumed quickly and cannot be stored indefinitely in the fridge. However, the prices are very affordable, and sometimes even halved. An inconvenient of this app could be the fact that it is not possible to choose the products you wish to have in the basket, but in my opinion I find it even more interesting since it allows consumers to discover new products that they would not necessarily have bought.

What I really appreciate about this app is that it benefits every stakeholder taking part of the project: food stores and restaurants are able to sell products (at a low price) they would have thrown away, plus it enables consumers to buy many products from their favorite shops or restaurants at a very reasonable price. And in the end, everyone takes part to a very current issue which is food waste.

Some figures

To Good To Go counts 179 145 food traders that reduce their food waste and 71 877 765 steady consumers mostly in Europe. The company plans to expand the project to the USA and Canada which is in line with the UN target to reduce food waste by 50% by 2030.

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