More than 10,000 meals have been “saved” in Richmond over the last year, thanks to an app which marries stores with left-over produce to consumers looking for an inflation-busting bargain.
Too Good To Go (TGTG) launched in Metro Vancouver 14 months ago and a year ago in Richmond, where 55 stores – including pizza places, bubble tea cafes, take-aways and supermarkets – have signed up to get rid of their fare at drastically-cut prices.
In that 12 months, TGTG, which gets a commission from each sale, claims that the equivalent of 10,637 meals have been saved from going straight into the garbage.
The items offered on the app are produce that is perfectly safe to eat, but is destined to get tossed at closing and which the store doesn’t want to sell the next day.
The only catch for the consumer being that you don’t know exactly what you’re buying, with the items for sale being bunched into a so-called “surprise bag” for you to collect.
One of the Richmond stores on the app is Le Doux Ciel, which only opened in Aberdeen Centre in October, while its Vancouver location has been using the service since June.
We don't want to sell old produce
“We want to keep everything at a very high quality. We don’t want to keep stuff overnight and sell it the next day,” explained Le Doux Ciel’s Richmond manager, Ken Lai.
“We realized that, when we were closing, we had some produce left over. We thought, ‘what do we do with this?’ So we use it kind of like a promotion (on the app).
“It’s usually about a third of the price. What we don’t sell that day, we usually don’t sell the next day anyway.”
Lai said his surprise bags can contain just about anything they sell in the store, from pastries to cakes and croissants.
He said there is no specific time of the day he will load a surprise bag onto the app, it just depends when the produce is available.
Other notable stores using the app are Tiger Sugar bubble tea, Fusion Feast pizza and Wu Han Spicy Duck.
TGTG claims that more than 240,000 meal equivalents have been saved from more than 700 food businesses across the Metro Vancouver area since its local launch in the fall of 2021.
The most meals saved, it says, were in the Marpole neighbourhood, with bakeries being the most popular.
