This App Already Reduced Food Waste in Europe – Now It Goes to the US

An app launched in 2016 in Copenhagen, Denmark, has managed to salvage 100,000 meals per day across Europe, thus reducing food waste and providing discount meals to millions of people, and is looking to expand its network to the United States.

“It’s trying to give all this food that normally would go to waste a second chance, and creating a marketplace for consumers to buy it at a discount,” says Mette Lykke, CEO of the Too Good To Go app which, essentially, is a marketplace for surplus food where stores, restaurants and bakeries offer whatever excess food they have at the end of the day for a third of the regular price.

So far, the app has 22 million users across 13 European countries, and the company is looking to expand its market to the US and Sweden very soon. In America, up to 40% of all food goes to waste. And with some 37 million Americans struggling to put food on the table, “it’s a big problem for us to solve,” says Lekke. By quantifying loss and waste along the supply chain, apps like Too Good To Go could potentially solve the food waste problem because they help pinpoint where to intervene. “The problem is way bigger than just the restaurant business. The mindset we have around food is a bit flawed, and we’re trying to bring respect for food back to people’s minds.”