Restaurants waste a massive amount of food. In the US alone, analysts estimate restaurants waste up to 40 percent of the food they purchase. UK has a similar problem, wasting about 600,000 tons of food a year, according to ‘Too Good To Go” (TGTG) co-founder James Crummie.
Too Good to Go matches restaurants with hungry customers. Participating restaurants list their leftovers, and customers can browse to see what’s available. You can order right from the app, then go pick up your bargain dish.
App available in cities in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, and the U.K. It’s designed more as a way to manage waste than to generate a profit: Although the restaurants do make a little on each non-wasted meal, the idea is that they avoid losing money and that they don’t waste perfectly good food.
Food waste just seems like one of the dumbest problems we have in this world. The restaurant industry is wasting about 600,000 tonnes of food each year, and in the UK alone there are one million people on emergency food parcels from food banks. Why do we have these two massive social issues that are completely connected, yet there is not much going on to address them?
“The ultimate goal is to use it for restaurants to solve their waste management problem, rather than it being about making profit,” Wilson told London’s Evening Standard. To this end, Too Good to Go provides standardized, “eco-friendly packaging,” and the app/service takes care of everything, even the payments. Once you’ve paid, you get a voucher to take to the restaurant.
You can browse a list of restaurants in your city, or take a look at a map to find something nearby. The before/after price is listed, and everything costs between £2.00 to £3.80, or local equivalent (£2 is around $2.60). Different restaurants handle the scheme differently. For instance, a nearby bakery just gives you a goodie bag filled with whatever they haven’t sold. And a local sushi place gives you a box and lets you fill it from their selection of leftovers.
Users also have the option to buy food and give it away to people in need. For this, users simply need to donate one British pound or more through the app to contribute to the more than 1,100 meals donated so far.
To use the app, users simply log in, pick a restaurant and pay through the app. From there, they can pick up food at designated times — usually slow periods between lunch and dinner or after close — and take it home to enjoy in an environmentally-friendly carton of their choosing.
Read more at : fastcoexits & TNW
