New App Lets You Buy Leftover Restaurant Food at a Discount

Too Good To Go is a new restaurant take-out app that aims to reduce food waste and help people find affordable meals at the same time. The Huffington Post reports that Too Good To Go, which recently launched in five cities across the UK, provides customers with discounted restaurant food that would otherwise be discarded.

Instead of tossing leftovers at the end of the day, participating restaurants can now sell the food to customers through the app at prices ranging from £2 (about $2.58) to £3.80 (about $4.89). App users can enter their zip code or let the app access their location to view restaurant options for the evening. Since eateries are selling whatever is left over at the end of the day, users can choose the restaurant, but not the dish. After making their selection, they can pick up their deliciously cheap dinner at a range of designated times.

Too Good To Go not only keeps unused restaurant food out of landfills, it gives users the opportunity to donate meals to others. At any time, app users can donate £1 or more to people in need, and according to the Too Good To Go website, 1167 meals have already been donated.

Too Good To Go founders told Business Green that the goal of the app is to fight food poverty and reduce the huge quantities of food that are unnecessarily wasted in the UK each year. “Food waste just seems like one of the dumbest problems we have in this world,” Too Good To Go co-founder James Crummie said. “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?”

So far, the self-proclaimed “hyper-local environmental social enterprise” is available in Leeds, Brighton, Birmingham, Manchester, and London in the UK, as well as six other countries. According to a U.S. company page on Facebook, the app will also be arriving stateside sometime soon. 

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