It’s 10pm on a Wednesday night and I’m standing in Blessed, a takeaway in south London, half-listening to another customer speaking honestly about Jesus. I nod, trying to pay attention to the reggae music echoing around the little yellow storefront. But really, all I can think about is: What’s in the bag?
Today’s bag is made of blue plastic. A smiling man hands it over the counter. Only when I leave the religious lecture and return home do I discover what’s inside: Caribbean salted fish, white rice, vegetables and a cup of bulky, brown oatmeal.
All week I’ve been living on mystery parcels like this one handed out by cafes, takeaways and restaurants across London. Inside there is food that was once destined for the trash. Instead, I saved it with Too Good To Go, a Danish app that is growing in popularity and selling out 120 million meals last year and is growing rapidly in the US. For five days, I decided to redirect my weekly food budget solely through the app, paying anywhere from £3 to £6 (about $4 to $8) for meals ranging from a few cookies to a giant box of groceries in an attempt to understand what a tech company can do for me teach about food waste in my city.
Users who open the TGTG app will be shown a list of locations that are either currently out of food or will be available in the near future. A brief description of the restaurant, price and time slot are provided. Users pay through the app, but it is not a delivery service. Bags with surprises – customers have no idea what is inside before purchasing – must be picked up in person.
I begin the experiment at 9:30 a.m. on a Monday morning, in the gleaming lobby of the Novotel, a few steps from the River Thames. Of all the breakfast options available the night before, this was the most convenient – on the way to my office and offering a pick-up time, meaning I could arrive at my 10:00 meeting. When I say I’m here for TGTG, the receptionist in a suit nods and points to the breakfast buffet. This branch of the Novotel is a £200-a-night hotel and yet the staff don’t begrudge the £4.50 entry fee I paid in exchange for leftover breakfast. A homeless charity says its customers like the app for this very reason; economical food, no stigma. The waiter politely hands over my white plastic surprise bag with two Styrofoam boxes inside, as if I were any other guest.
I open boxes in my office. One is filled with mini cakes and the other is filled with full English. Two fried eggs sit on top of a mountain of scrambled eggs. Four sausages jostle for space with a crowd of mushrooms. I urgently start eating – a bite of frigid fried egg, a bite of mushrooms, all four sausages. I’ll finish with a croissant. It’s enough to make me feel very full, borderline nauseous, so I return the croissants to the office kitchen and throw the rest into the trash. The beginning seems disappointing. I am supposed to save wasted food, not throw it away.
For the next two days, I live like a picker in my city, shaping my days around pickup trucks. I walk and bike to cafes, restaurants, markets, supermarkets; to famed places and places I never noticed. Some surprise bags will only last for one meal, others can stretch over several days. On Tuesday morning, my £3.59 surprise bag contains a miniature cake and a slightly stale sourdough loaf, which provides breakfast for the next three days. When I return to the same cafe the following week, without using the app, the loaf alone costs £6.95.
TGTG was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by a group of Danish entrepreneurs who were irritated by food waste at all-you-can-eat buffets. Their idea to reuse this waste quickly caught on, and the application expanded to restaurants and supermarkets. A year after founding the company, Mette Lykke was sitting on a bus when a woman showed her the app and how it worked. She was so impressed that she contacted the company and asked if they could aid. Lykke has been CEO for six years.
“I just hate wasting resources,” he says. “It was just a win-win concept.” According to her, restaurants win because they make money on food they would otherwise throw away; the customer wins because he or she gets a good offer while discovering fresh places; and the environment wins because, in her opinion, food waste contributes to it 10 percent our global greenhouse gas emissions. When discarded food rots in a landfill, it is released methane to the atmosphere – with homes and restaurants contributing the most.
But the app doesn’t leave me feeling like I’m saving the planet. Instead, I feel more like I’m on a daily treasure hunt for discounted food. On Wednesday, TGTG leads me to the railway arch that serves as the depot for the grocery delivery app Gorillas. Before I can utter the words “Too Good To Go,” a teenage girl with overgrown bangs emerges quietly from the aisles of the shelves with an evening bag: groceries still days from expiration, which suspiciously make up an entire meal for two. For £5.50 I get fresh pasta, pesto, cream, bacon, leek and a packet of stir-fry vegetables which my husband combines into one (delicious) pasta dish. It’s too convenient to be a real waste. Perhaps Gorillas is trying to convince me to become his own client? When I ask my parent company, Getir, how selling expired food helps fight food waste, the company does not respond to my email.
I’m still thinking about my gorilla adventures on Thursday lunchtime as I follow the app’s directions to the Wowshee falafel stand, where 14 other people are already waiting in line on the street. After a few random conversations, I realize I’m one of at least four TGTG users in the queue. Seeing so many of us in one place again makes me wonder if restaurants are just using the app as a form of advertising. But Wowshee’s owner, Ahmed El Shimi, describes the marketing benefits as just a “small bonus.” According to him, the main advantage of the app is that it helps reduce waste. “We can sell a product that we were going to throw away anyway,” he says. “And at the same time it saves the environment.” El Shimi, who says he sells about 20 bags of surprises a day, estimates that using TGTG reduces the amount of food wasted at the stall by about 60 percent. When I pay £5 for two portions of falafel – enough for lunch and dinner – the company receives £3.75 before tax, says El Shimi. “It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing.”
On Friday, the last day of my experiment, everything falls apart. I don’t sleep well and wake up tardy. The loaf from earlier in the week is solid as a rock. For breakfast I eat some mini apple pies, which were part of a generous £3.09 shipment from Morrisons the night before. Looking through the app, nothing appeals to me, and even if it does, I’m too tired to leave the house to pick it up. After four days of eating nothing but waste, I break down and seek comfort in familiar ingredients buried in my cupboard: two fried eggs on my favorite brand of seeded brown bread.
TGTG is not a solution for convenience. For me, the app is the answer to feeling bad about having lunch at the office. It took me out of my lethargic routine and at the same time helped me eat well – in central London – on a budget of £5. While waiting in line for falafel, I met another app user who told me how before she discovered the app, she ate the same sandwich from the same supermarket every day for lunch. For people who don’t have access to a kitchen, it provides access to the underground world of warm food.