With surplus food apps you can save a lot of money on groceries and baked goods
Some new apps can find stores and bakeries near you where you can buy surplus food for pennies.
Scripps News
Too Good To Go, a mobile app that helps restaurants, bakeries and markets sell excess food at huge discounts to bargain hunters with late-night cravings, is now taking orders in Columbus.
The app already has 75 local businesses on the sales page, including Ray Ray’s Hog Pit, Lion Cub’s Cookies, Dan the Baker, DK Diner, CHOP5 Salad Kitchen and several Whole Foods stores. In the first week, users have already made 3,600 purchases, a spokesperson said.
Too Good To Go also launched in Cleveland and Cincinnati last week, with more than 50 sellers in each city. It started in Copenhagen in 2016 and now has 95 million registered users and 160,000 surplus food sellers across Europe and North America.
The idea behind the app is to reduce food waste, a problem here and around the world. The Solid Waste Authority of Central Ohio (SWACO) has estimated that 1 million pounds of food ends up in the Franklin County landfill every day. This number is set to be halved by 2030. Globally, an estimated 40% of all food is wasted.
“Food waste occurs at all levels,” said Sarah Soteroff, spokeswoman for Too Good To Go. “No store is too small or too big.”
Users who download the Too Good To Go app can focus on Columbus — Soteroff recommends setting a 20-mile search radius — and see a constantly updated list of sellers with prices often reduced to a third of the items’ original value.
An assortment of Lion Cub’s cookies, normally sold for $18, recently sold for $5.99. Food items that Ray Ray’s normally sells for $30 were sold for $9.99.
While restaurants usually make their sales around closing time in the evening, some bakeries offer their goods all day long.
There is a catch, however: you never know exactly what you’re going to get. Since restaurants and shops can’t predict what they’ll have left at the end of a given day, they publish their items on Too Good To Go in what they freely define as a “mystery bag.”
Whole Foods in Easton, for example, offered a surprise bag yesterday for $6.99, “filled with a variety of baked goods including bread, muffins, scones and cookies.”
Ray Ray’s large $9.99 mystery bag typically contains 2 pounds of whatever meat is available and unspecified family-sized sides, according to restaurant spokesman Evan Brown.
Small bags sold for $4.99 contain a half-pound to a full pound of meat and fixings, he said. Ray Ray’s posts also always promise “and/or more.”
The mystery has led to warning labels for people with food allergies, gluten-free diets and other dietary restrictions. Baked goods in particular have been warned that they may have passed their best-before date, even though they are still safe to eat.
The novelty of the whole venture has spawned an entire category on social network Reddit, where people share their best Too Good To Go bargains and flops. There seem to be a lot more of the former, but the latter are much more entertaining.
One legend on the subreddit is a user from Kansas City who snapped a photo of her haul at her local Whole Foods: seven containers of coleslaw with a note: “I really hope you enjoy coleslaw.”
Instagram: @dispatchdining
