Too Good to Go prevents businesses from discarding unsold items at the day’s end by offering customers the chance to purchase leftover products at significantly reduced prices, which also benefits their budgets.
The app has now arrived in the Sunshine State after proving popular interstate, with 600,000 Australian users already.
“We connect stores with consumers where we pick up surplus food that hasn’t been sold that day,” Joost Rietveld from Too Good To Go said.
“Typically you pay around let’s say $10 for a ‘surprise bag’ and then what you get is usually around $30 of value.”
Tessa Boehm signed up her Fortitude Valley juice bar, Pressi, two weeks ago.
“The minimal wastage of food is what’s really attractive,” she said, adding, “everything’s made with so much love”.
Boehm’s already blown away by the popularity of her “surprise bags”, which go on sale when the store’s closing time nears.
“[There’s] around $21 value and the customers get it for about $7,” she said.
Boehm is already seeing repeat customers from the app.
“For store owners, they’re not just seeing recovery of the costs, they’re also seeing new faces come into their store,” Rietveld said.
In addition to stopping perfectly good food from ending up in the trash, customers have the opportunity to extend their savings further—be it for breakfast, school lunches, or even family meals.
“It’s actually exactly the same quality as the product that you would have bought five minutes before as a normal paying customer,” Rietveld said.
“Pick up a ‘surprise bag’ with a lot of bread and put it into the freezer [and] you’re really impacting your cost budget for that category.”
More than 100 Queensland stores have already gone live on the app, with more signing up every week. The app is free to download.
Best advice is to reserve your surprise bag early in the day to ensure you don’t miss out.
“These days, prices are a bit steeper everywhere, and catching a bargain wherever possible is always nice,” customer Crystal French shared with 9News.
