Too Good To Go: As featured on the BBC's The One Show!
Link (skip to 10 mins 34 seconds):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b07v28f6/the-one-show-22092016
What is Too Good To Go?
Too Good To Go (ww.toogoodtogo.co.uk) is a new social enterprise dedicated to tackling food waste by making food that restaurants, cafes and bakeries would otherwise throw away available for collection just before they close - at massively reduced prices.
Why are we fighting food waste?
Food waste is a global epidemic. One-third of all the food produced worldwide is binned, and if less than a quarter of the wasted food in the USA, UK and Europe alone were put to its rightful use then nobody on the planet would be going hungry.
Our mission is to place the lost value back onto food as something that should be eaten and not thrown away. Specifically, we're aiming to make a dent in the 600,000 tonnes of edible restaurant food that gets binned every year with the ambition of changing the common perception on food waste. We want to show that much of what's thrown away isn't actually 'waste' at all - just stuff that ends up in the bin because there's nowhere else to put it.
How does Too Good To Go fight food waste?
Through the free Too Good To Go app users can order to collect food roughly half an hour before a restaurant's end of service for between £2 and £3.80. There's a huge selection of food available on the app across 150 partners in Leeds, London, Brighton, Birmingham and Manchester, with a wide range of places serving up cuisines from the world over. Collection times vary throughout the day depending on whether you're picking up from a restaurant, cafe, bakery, hotel or market stall.
Simply download the app, choose a restaurant, place an order, head to the restaurant at the specified time, show your mobile receipt and collect your food to enjoy on-the-go in our environmentally friendly sugar-cane boxes or recyclable paper bags.
Using food 'waste' to fight food poverty
At the core of the TGTG app is the integrated Pay-It-Forward scheme - our social scheme which allows users to donate £1 to be put towards providing a meal to someone in need. So far this has entailed redistributing food directly to those in need, but we're also working on a couple of potential partnerships with some amazing organisations which will allow us to create a more structured and effective process of doing this.
(Also, we're looking for volunteers who can help us redistribute food. If you fancy getting involved then please drop us a message on our Facebook page or email [email protected])
The story so far
Since launching on 1st June 2016 we've diverted over 3500 meals from bins to bellies, saving an estimated 7000KG of carbon dioxide emissions from entering our atmosphere.
In August 2016 word of our project started to gather momentum in the mainstream media, and as a result our app has been downloaded over 60000 times. We've since been featured on BBC's The One Show (Friday 16th September) as well as many regional, national and international media outlets. A video AJ+ made about Too Good To Go was viewed by over 5.2 million people and shared by more than 70000 of you!
We've also been featured in the media quite a bit:
Having started work on Too Good To Go at the end of 2015, it's taken a great deal of effort founded on very little financial investment and lots of voluntary hours work for us to get this far. And now we need your help to take us to the next step.
So why are we crowdfunding?
With each day that goes by we're receiving more and more messages asking to bring Too Good To Go to the rest of the UK. With a current presence in five cities, we have a target to be active in at least 10 UK cities by the end of 2016.
£16800 will help us expand into Bristol, Liverpool, Oxford, Cardiff and Glasgow whilst also allowing us to build on our exisiting operations in London, Brighton, Leeds, Birmingham and Manchester. Your pledge will make a real difference as we look to spread our wings nationwide, partner with more restaurants and ultimately save more food.
Why target those cities?
We can work with restaurants from all over the country, but for the next three months we want to establish a presence and grow a Too Good To Go team in the cities named above for the following reasons.
Bristol
We've had overwhelming demand to bring Too Good To Go to Bristol. With a progressive, engaged demographic that embraces causes which do good, we've been trying to crack Bristol for a long time but quite simply not had the resources to do so. Similarly to Brighton, Bristol is synonymous with being green - the Green Party came second only to Labour in last year's general election with 26.7% of the vote.
Bristol's diverse restaurant marketplace is characterised by independents and small chains who we're sure would love what we're doing - we just need to make them aware of it!
Liverpool
Again, Liverpudlians have been writing to us in the masses encouraging us to introduce the concept to their hometown. With many other anti-food waste organisations currently active in the city and over 40% of the population being under 30, the perfect demographic is in place to help Too Good To Go become a success. An easily accessible city centre in which pretty much everything is within walking distance we're excited to introduce our project to the city's people, universities and its student population of over 50000.
Oxford
We've already been in contact with some fantastic organisations in Oxford like Good Food Oxford who are really keen to help us get going there and their enthusiasm for the cause has certainly rubbed off on us. With a thriving student population and a whole host of incredible eateries, we can't wait to get going!
Cardiff
We'd love to bring Too Good To Go to the good people of Wales - and what better place to start than Cardiff? Its three university campuses, close links to Bristol and a dense population of over 350000 make it the ideal spot to launch our Wales-wide roll-out.
Glasgow
After much research and consultation regarding expanding to Scotland we've chosen to base our launch around Glasgow. However, being so close to Edinburgh we're hopeful that we can start making movements in both cities - as long as we reach our target!
How exactly will your pledge help us to achieve our goals?
Up to now we've been almost exclusively reliant on volunteers and small university grants from our former universities. With relatively little we've been able to achieve quite a lot, but we're well aware that this is only the beginning. In order to maintain our operations in our existing cities and support growth into new areas we need to be able to fund a team of staff who can solely focus on the project, as well as stock up on the eco-friendly packaging that we supply to participating restaurants.
We also need to ensure that we have a stock of cash to use to fund our marketing efforts when we enter new cities and we really need to hire our first internal staff member - even on a a part-time basis - to help us cope with all the inbound enquiries we're getting and hopefully allow us to start going to sleep at reasonable hours again!
Here's a rough idea of what your pledge will be spent on:
What you've been saying about Too Good To Go
Celebs Ellie Goulding and Shailene Woodley have shown their support for our cause, but more importantly we've had some amazing feedback from you.
Here's one heartwarming message from a Brighton TGTG user which resonates with us every single day.
Thank you Too Good To Go. I used to be poor, hungry and concerned about caring for our planet.
Now I'm only one of those.
And here are just a selection of your tweets:
Who's behind Too Good To Go?
Friends Chris Wilson and Jamie Crummie met at the University of Leeds in 2010, where Chris studied English and Spanish and Jamie Law. Since then, both have completed master's degrees - Jamie in International Human Rights Law and Chris in International Business.
As former vice-president of Leeds University's Amnesty International society Jamie has always been engaged with social justice and fighting inequalities, having recently spent time in Calais undertaking primary research with refugees in the Jungle. Chris is passionate about sustainable business and corporate social responsibility and in 2014 published this paper on responsbility for migrant labour exploitation in Qatar in the build up to the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
Supported by an invaluable network of 10 volunteers in the UK, Chris and Jamie are the only people currently working on Too Good To Go full-time. See more on the TGTG team at www.toogoodtogo.co.uk/about.
Too Good To Go UK works in tandem with our partner organisations in Denmark, France, Norway, Germany and Switzerland, who have also just recently started out. This means we can collaborate to build the best technology platforms to help us grow faster and ultimately save more food, whilst also benefitting from an international network which can help us tap into the global food corporations which waste hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food per year worldwide. We're already having some really good conversations with some of these and I'm sure we'll be able to get a couple of the major culprits on the app soon enough - exciting!
Thanks for taking the time to get this far. Here's another short video about how we work and we hope we can bring TGTG to you soon, wherever you are!
Thank you for visiting our crowdfunding page and I hope you can support us so that we can bring Too Good To Go nationwide.