It’s 10pm on a Wednesday night and I’m standing in Blessed, a takeaway joint in south London, half-listening to my fellow customers as they speak earnestly about Jesus. Reggae blares from the little yellow shopfront and I’m nodding and trying to pay attention, but all I’m really thinking about is what’s in the bag?
Today’s bag is blue plastic, and a smiling man handed it over the counter. It wasn’t until I left the religion lecture and returned home that I discovered what was inside: Caribbean salted fish, white rice, vegetables, and a bowl of thick brown porridge.
This week, I’ve been living off these mysterious parcels from cafes, takeaways, and restaurants across London, containing food that would have been destined for the bin. I rescued them using Too Good To Go, an increasingly popular Danish app that sold more than 120 million meals last year and is quickly gaining popularity in the US. For five days, I committed my weekly food budget to only meals sourced through the app. I paid between £3 and £6 (about $4 to $8) for meals that ranged from handfuls of cake to giant boxes of groceries, to try to understand what I could learn from tech companies about food waste in my city.
When you open the TGTG app, you’re presented with a list of places that currently have food surpluses or will have surpluses in the near future. You’re provided with a brief description of the restaurant, the price, and opening hours. Users pay through the app, but it’s not a delivery service; surprise bags (whose contents are only vaguely known before you buy them) must be picked up in person.
I began my experiment at 9:30am on a Monday morning in the gleaming lobby of the Novotel hotel, just steps from the Thames. Of the breakfast options available the night before, it was the most convenient. They offer a pick-up time on the way to the office so I could be there in time for a 10am meeting. When I said I was there for TGTG, the suited receptionist nodded and gestured towards the breakfast buffet. This branch of the Novotel is a £200-a-night hotel, but the staff didn’t seem to begrudge me the £4.50 admission I paid in exchange for my breakfast leftovers. Homeless charities say their customers love the app for that very reason: a cheap meal without the stigma. The waiter politely handed me a white plastic surprise bag containing two styrofoam boxes, as if I were just another guest.
I open the boxes at my office and find one stuffed with mini pastries, the other crammed full English. Two fried eggs on a pile of scrambled eggs. Four sausages jostle for space with a bunch of mushrooms. I begin to eat: one bite of cold fried egg, one bite of mushrooms, four sausages, and finally a croissant. I’m so full I’m about to puke, so I donate the croissant to the office kitchen and throw the rest in the bin. A sad start. Food waste should be rescued, not thrown away.
For the next two days, I live like a forager in the city, spending my days mainly on pickups. I walk or cycle to cafes, restaurants, markets, supermarkets, familiar shops and places I’d never paid attention to before. Some of the surprise bags last just one meal, while others last for days. The £3.59 surprise bag I bought on Tuesday morning contains a small cake and a slightly stale loaf of sourdough bread, enough for three days’ worth of breakfast. The following week, if I return to the same cafe without the app, the bread alone will cost me £6.95.
TGTG was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by a group of Danish entrepreneurs outraged by the amount of food wasted at all-you-can-eat buffets. The idea to reuse food waste quickly caught on, and the app’s reach expanded to restaurants and supermarkets. A year after founding the company, Mette Ricke was on a bus when a woman told her about the app and how to use it. She was so impressed that she contacted the company to ask if they could work together. Ricke has been CEO for six years now.
“I hate wasting resources,” she says. “It was really a win-win concept.” To her, restaurants win because they get to sell food that they would otherwise throw away, customers win because they get to save money and discover new places to eat at the same time, and the environment wins, since food waste, she says, accounts for 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. When discarded food rots in landfills, it releases methane into the atmosphere; households and restaurants are the two biggest sources.
But the app doesn’t give me the impression that I’m saving the planet. Instead, it feels like a daily treasure hunt for discounted food. On Wednesday, TGTG took me to the railway arches that serve as the warehouse for grocery delivery app Gorillas. Before I could utter the words “Too Good To Go,” a teenager with overgrown bangs silently emerged from an aisle of shelves with tonight’s bag. The groceries, which still have days left on their expiration date, mysteriously add up to a meal for two. For £5.50, I receive a bag of fresh pasta, pesto, cream, bacon, leeks and stir-fried vegetables, which my husband mixes into one (delicious) pasta dish. It feels too convenient to really waste. Maybe Gorillas is trying to turn me into its own customer? When I asked parent company Getir how selling food within its expiration date helps reduce food waste, the company did not respond to my email.
Still reminiscing about my Gorillaz experience on Thursday lunchtime, I follow the app’s directions to Wowsy’s falafel market stall, where 14 people are already in line. After a few casual conversations, I realise I’m one of at least four TGTG users in the queue. Seeing so many people gathered in one place again makes me wonder if the restaurant is just using the app as advertising. But Wowsy owner Ahmed El Shimi describes the marketing benefits as just “a little extra”. For him, the app’s biggest draw is that it helps reduce waste. “You can sell products that you would have thrown away anyway,” he says. “And at the same time, you’re helping the environment.” El Shimi, who sells around 20 surprise bags a day, estimates that using TGTG reduces the amount of food his stall throws out by around 60 percent. When I pay £5 for two servings of falafel (two for lunch and one for dinner), the stall gets £3.75 before tax, El Shimi says. “It’s not a big deal, but it’s better than nothing.”
On Friday, the final day of the experiment, it all came crashing down. I slept poorly and woke late. The bread I’d baked earlier in the week was still stale. For breakfast, I ate a few mini apple pies, part of a £3.09 grocery purchase from Morrisons the night before. I looked at the app and there was nothing I liked, and even if there was, I was too tired to leave the house to get it. After four days of eating nothing but waste food, I sought solace in familiar ingredients buried in the cupboard, topping my favourite seeded brown bread with two fried eggs.
TGTG is not a convenience solution. For me, the app is a solution to the discomfort of office lunches. It helped me escape my lazy routine while also getting a tasty meal on a £5 budget in central London. I met a fellow app-user while queuing for falafel. She told me that before she found the app, she would eat the same sandwich from the same supermarket every day for lunch. For those without access to a kitchen, the app provides a connection to an underworld of surplus hot food.
