Too Good To Go teams up with Whole Foods

The program rolls out nationwide today at over 450 Whole Foods Market stores. The Too Good To Go app works by allowing businesses to list “surprise bags” of unsold items that users can reserve to pick up at the end of the day. There is no fee for customers to use the app. Too Good To Go takes a $1.79 in commission from each meal sold on the app, with the business getting the remaining sum. The company also charges partners an annual $89 administrative fee that’s taken out of their total profits. At Whole Foods, specifically, the daily surprise bags are $9.99 for prepared foods worth $30 and $6.99 for bakery items worth $21. 

Grocery in particular accounts for a big chunk of the annual food waste in the U.S. Food waste currently makes up about 30% to 40% of the food supply and is the largest category in landfills, according to the FDA. The Whole Foods program comes at a time when the grocery chain is trying to meet its own sustainability milestones, with the goal to cut its food waste in half by 2030.

Liz Wilson, head of key accounts at Too Good To Go, told Modern Retail the Whole Foods collaboration is a “major milestone” for the company. Globally, grocery partners include Carrefour, Aldi, Co-op, and Morrisons. Wilson said that Too Good To Go doesn’t have a specific quota for growing its roster of grocery chains, but plans to grow through a mixture of businesses that include restaurants, cafes and retail stores.

In April, Too Good To Go added the Canadian grocery chain Metro. Circle K’s parent company, Alimentation Couche-Tard, first partnered with Too Good To Go in 2018 for its Canadian convenience chain Couche-Tard stores. The partnership expanded in June to over 9,000 Circle K and Couche-Tard locations across Canada, the U.S., Ireland and Poland, up from about 1,300.

Aside from helping businesses distribute food that would go to waste, Wilson said Too Good To Go also helps the retailers and restaurants recoup some of the revenue they’d lose on unsold food that went to waste.

Wilson said Too Good To Go is also positioning the app as a discovery tool for businesses. “We’re actually inviting users into these locations, which helps boost in-store traffic, and that now includes Whole Foods Market,” Wilson said. According to Too Good To Go, 41% of customers purchased additional items when collecting their bag, while 61% reported they only visited a store because of their surprise bag purchase. “So there is certainly an opportunity to engage those customers to purchase something else.” 

The Whole Foods program has been in the works for about a year, with the first pilot program kicking off in Austin last July. “That was to dip our toes and see how it works for them and how employees feel about [running] an additional program,” Wilson said. “We got great feedback and continued to tweak and expand it.” Markets like Chicago, Denver and Phoenix were added to the Whole Foods pilot in March. By the end of this year, Wilson said every Whole Foods Market location is expected to be on the Too Good To Go app.

Over the past few months, social media users have started noticing Whole Foods’ availability on the Too Good To Go app and have started posting reviews of their rescued Whole Foods goods on apps like TikTok and Reddit. The bags’ contents range from baked goods like bread and cookies to popular prepared dishes like mushroom stroganoff and grilled chicken. The posts are mainly organic videos by users purchasing the bags on their own. Many of them are drawn to Too Good To Go due to the promise of discounted food. As one TikTok user described her surprise bag earlier this month, “For $10: I think three meals is a pretty good deal.” In the last couple of years, user-generated content has been instrumental to Too Good To Go’s growth.

“Wherever there is surplus, we’ll be there to help,” Wilson said. She added that for Whole Foods, the Too Good To Go program “fits into a larger ecosystem at Whole Foods” that’s aimed at reducing surplus inventory. Other initiatives include food donation, composting and “Enjoy Today,” which are in-store discounts on items close to the sell-by date. According to Whole Foods, last year it donated nearly 34 million pounds of food to programs across the country.

Jeremy Levine, senior director in the consumer and retail group at Alvarez & Marsal, said product waste is one of the biggest operational issues retailers and restaurants face daily. 

“There is an unpredictability of customer demand combined with short shelf-life of perishable products and strict regulations on prepared food storage,” Levine said. Even with improved data analytics, he said it can be difficult to match production to demand — especially when the products have a relatively short window to be of good quality for consumption. “Ever-improving AI-powered production planning tools are mitigating this risk but remain an expensive solution,” Levine said.

Investing in surplus programs helps mitigate some of the issue, Levine said. But the financial recovery from these programs “is relatively limited when put against the huge savings which can be made from improved forecasting and in-store execution of accurate production plans. 

Too Good To Go became profitable on a monthly basis as of 2023, according to Forbes, and at the time saw revenue of around €102 million (~$111 million) a year. Wilson didn’t specify which retailers are joining the platform in the coming months, but said Too Good To Go continues to grow as a company and is building out its North American team.

“We’re in conversation with a number of potential partners across the country,” Wilson said, adding that surplus food is an issue many of them deal with. “We invite all restaurants, cafes, grocery, and convenience stores to Too Good To Go.”