Every year, one-third of the world’s food is lost or wasted, according to the United Nations.
In an effort to address the problem, various services have cropped up, including the popular mobile app Too Good To Go, which allows consumers to buy “surprise bags” of leftover food directly from stores and restaurants, ordering in advance and retrieving the goods in a certain time window, usually at the end of the day.
Since it launched in 2016, the app has been used in 19 countries and by dozens of Bay Area retailers, including Acme Bread and Whole Foods in Berkeley.
While the app’s aims are laudable, a 2025 study from Berkeley Haas found that, in fact, the service may be exacerbating waste by causing retailers who use it to overproduce and consumers to overpurchase.
Using a theoretical model, Haas Assistant Professor Luyi Yang and coauthor Man Yu from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology tracked the sequence of events in a food’s cycle, from initial production to final purchase at clearance rates. In the model, when high-end consumers who would typically buy at regular price instead buy clearance bags through Too Good To Go, they end up throwing out whatever they can’t use or don’t like.
“You’re actually shifting waste from the store level to the household level. If I have a bag of 36 bagels, the chance is slim that I’m going to consume every single one of them, right?” Yang told California.
The researchers also posit that stores might be producing more in anticipation of Too Good To Go orders, instead of simply selling whatever amount of surplus product remains at the end of the day.
They found that merchants with thin profit margins, like grocery stores, won’t see much upside to using the app either in terms of profits or diverting waste.
But there is a sweet spot. When high-profit-margin retailers like upscale bakeries and restaurants sell to low-end consumers, who couldn’t normally afford it, waste is actually reduced.
In the end, Yang said, “Too Good To Go is not always the best model in terms of decreasing food waste. Sometimes you should actually resort to the more traditional scheme of just selling your surplus food at a discounted price without any surprise element.”
