Still good enough to eat but not quite as fresh as it was at the start of the day, restaurants the world over are well known to trash perfectly decent food on a daily basis come closing time.
The issue of food waste in the restaurant trade motivated a couple of London-based entrepreneurs to search for a fix. Their solution? An app that lets people order leftover restaurant and cafe grub that’d otherwise be dumped.
Meals cost from as little as £2 ($2.60), topping out at just £3.80 ($4.95), “and that’s for the second best Japanese restaurant in the country,” according to the two guys behind the Too Good To Go app.
Chris Wilson and Jamie Crummie, both 25, describe their idea as a “hyper-local environmental social enterprise dedicated to reducing food waste.”
To find out what’s available each evening, you simply enter your zip code to reveal local establishments with meals on offer, or allow the app to use your location to sniff out nearby possibilities. Then it’s just a case of browsing the list, tapping on a place that looks interesting, and placing an order. There’s no delivery option – you’re asked to collect your meal up to an hour before closing time. Continuing with its green theme, the food is served in an environmentally friendly Too Good To Go sugarcane box.
Wilson said that although a number of charities have been doing good work in recent years distributing food that’d otherwise be thrown out by the catering industry, many don’t operate on a wide enough scale to get on top of the issue of food wastage.
Too Good To Go is available for iOS and Android users, though the service can also be accessed via its website. It’s just launched in London and four other British cities, and also operates in a bunch of other European locations, though we bet a service like this would be a tasty proposition for U.S. folks, too.
