Too Good to Go mobile app offers restaurant leftovers cheaply
Too Good to Go is a social enterprise that offers a win-win - combating food wastage by connecting hungry consumers to restaurants willing to sell leftover food cheaply.
The mobile app lets consumers in British cities buy food from more than 170 restaurants, cafes or bakeries. for just £2 ($1.29) to £3.80 ($4.90). The catch is that the buyer can only collect the food in the hour before the restaurant's closing time.
"We're trying to highlight that food waste is not actually waste at all … and place a value on food as something that should be eaten and not thrown away," Chris Wilson, co-founder of Too Good To Go, told CNBC's "The Rundown."
"[Restaurants across the U.K.] are throwing out over 600,000 tons of edible food each year, that's something we're trying to raise awareness of," Wilson added.
Too Good to Go launched in Denmark at the end of 2015, before moving to the U.K. It's now established in major cities Brighton, Leeds and Birmingham and rolled out in London in August.
Globally, one third of the food produced for human consumption is wasted, while the food wasted in Europe alone could feed an additional 200 million people, according to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations statistics.
For would-be users who are skeptical about the safety or freshness of restaurant leftovers, the Too Good To Go team has an answer.
"We're working closely with organizations such as Sustainable Restaurants Association, and all the restaurants we're working with comply with food safety regulations to ensure that everything is fresh," Wilson said.
"As regular users of the app ourselves, if something doesn't represent value for money or doesn't come across as fresh, we'd likely be the first to know," he explained.
Another start-up with a similar concept is LeftoverSwap, a peer-to-peer platform that lets users post pictures of their leftovers for strangers to either barter for or collect for free.