“Come fight food waste with us” is the invitation issued by Too Good to Go, a startup company that launched in 2016. Four years later in 2020, the UK-based startup has crossed the pond over to the United States where an astounding 40% of food goes to waste.
Now that it’s serving 15 counties, it can boast of having saved 40.3M meals and 100,768 tonnes of CO2 due to the 8% of greenhouse emissions generated by food waste. It achieves those great results by picking up unsold food from restaurants, supermarkets, and bakeries to deliver it where it can be used.
A change in game plan
The pandemic presented the startup with new challenges, as it had been working off having individuals collect the food from various places. Georgina Preston, Too Good To Go’s head of marketing shared with Marketing Week how they had to be agile in meeting the changing needs of its audience.
It comes down to delivering “what is relevant to your audience.’” She explained:
“We started thinking what it is consumers and people would want to be hearing about now. What would be helpful for them but also encourage them to fight food waste.”
They delivered that by offering tips and recipes for food prep with inspiration for using leftovers offered by chefs and social media influencers on its Instagram channel. The Marketing Week article observed that the lockdown inspired 60% of the British population to sharpen their kitchen skills.
Another thing it did was help businesses sell their food under lockdown conditions at a time when restaurants barred from serving customers on premises, were struggling for survival. To that end, it launched a temporary not-for-profit initiative called Support Local, to help restaurants sell their dishes as takeout via their app.
“The idea of this is to give small businesses a platform from which they can keep serving delicious food, with an automated payment structure – and a customer base – all ready to go,” the site explained.
In describing the temporary initiative, it said that while it still aspires to its goal of reducing food wastes, it recognizes that “these are extraordinary times.” They are then able to pivot “to do our bit to help small businesses stay strong.”
Now that’s a very nice and innovative way to fight food waste and at the same support small business that were hit the hardest during the COVID-19 pandemic.
