An application aimed at creatively mitigating a massive food waste problem has moved to the Seattle area.
The Too Good To Go app allows people to buy food that would otherwise have been thrown out by restaurants, delicatessens, supermarkets, hotels and bakeries at one-third of the price.
Too Good to Go spokesperson, Claire DeMarco said the platform has moved to the Seattle Metropolitan area for about two weeks and already has about 200 businesses on-board.
DeMarco said 40 percent of the world’s food goes to waste, with over 130 billion pounds of wasted food thrown away annually.
Since the platform’s establishment nearly 37 million meals have been saved and over 90,000 businesses have joined the platform worldwide, according to DeMarco.
Basically, what the app does is create a marketplace for surplus food. Customers can affordably buy from their favorite food businesses, or they can use the app to try out a new business.
DeMarco said the food comes at a discounted price but customers may not know what they are about to receive in their “surprise bags,” because the logistics of creating a menu is too difficult, especially when businesses don’t know what kind of food they may have to offer from one day to the next.
However, customers with dietary restrictions can specify their needs to avoid situations like a vegetarian getting a bag full of meat.
Businesses receive the majority of the proceeds, while the Too Good To Go company receive 1.79$ transactional fee per purchase.
DeMarco said the Too Good To Go platform can work for any business with food waste, and the company hopes to expand throughout all of Washington state.
The application originally started in 2016 when the sustainability-minded founder of Too Good To Go, Lucie Basch noticed a French bakery throwing out pastries. She offered to purchase the baked goods that would have otherwise gone to waste and realized that that kind of transaction could be done at a much larger scale.
Basch said she views food wastes as an economic, social and environmental problem.
“The ambition is to build a global movement for fighting food waste,” Basch said.
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