The App That Saves Food
Imagine walking into your favorite local bakery, café, or sushi spot at closing time and walking out with a massive bag of delicious, fresh food for less than the price of a coffee. Now imagine that by doing so, you just kept greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.This isn’t a fantasy, this is the idea behind the app Too Good To Go. As a brilliant solution to the global problem of food waste, this app connects hungry, people with local businesses that have surplus food at the end of the day. It’s a win for your wallet, a win for local shops, and most importantly, a massive win for the environment. Here is how it works and why downloading it is the tastiest way to help the planet.
What is too good to go?
The concept behind the app is beautifully simple: businesses can’t always predict exactly how much food they will sell in a day. Instead of throwing away perfectly good, unsold items at closing time, restaurants, grocery stores, bakeries, and hotels pack them into what the app calls “Surprise Bags.”
Users open the free app, browse participating businesses nearby, and purchase a Surprise Bag for a fraction of the retail cost (usually around one-third of the original price). The catch? It’s a surprise! You might get a selection of gourmet pastries, a hearty portion of carved meats, fresh sushi rolls, or a bag of organic groceries. You simply show up at the designated pick-up time, swipe your app, and rescue your food.
Why ending food waste is so important.
To understand why rescuing a bag of leftover bagels matters, we have to look at the staggering environmental cost of food waste. Globally, one-third of all food produced for human consumption goes to waste. If food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, ranking right behind the USA and China.
When food is discarded and ends up rotting in a landfill, it decomposes anaerobically (without oxygen) and produces methane, a greenhouse gas that is roughly 28 to 36 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in our atmosphere.
Every Bag Makes a Difference
It is easy to feel powerless in the face of the global climate crisis, but individual actions stack up. To date, the Too Good To Go community has rescued over 300 million meals globally. That equates to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions prevented simply by people picking up a tasty, discounted evening snack. Fighting climate change has never tasted so good. Download the app today, rescue some delicious surplus food, and take a bite out of global food waste!
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