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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Waze

Too Good To Go Partners With Waze to Fight Food Waste

Too Good To Go is an app that connects users to stores and restaurants with unsold surplus food and offers it at a discounted price. This week, the company announced that it has partnered with Waze, a GPS navigation software app, to fight food waste.

The partnership is called Waze for Good initiative, and it will last throughout the month of August. On the Waze app, the map will feature 100 Too Good To Go partner businesses in the metro areas of Washington D.C., Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, and Portland. Some of the featured stores will include Just Salad, Auntie Anne’s La Colombe, Juice Press, PLNT Burger, Café d’Avignon.

Waze users will see dropped pins on the map for Too Good To Go business partners. When selected, these pins will give information about the business and the initiative. The participating partners will offer “surprise bags” of surplus food, costing around $3.99-$5.99 each, that users can pick up. Earlier this month, Too Good To Go partnered with JOKR, a ghost grocery store chain to offer similar $5 surprise bags of surplus products.

Approximately 40 percent of food waste in America comes from restaurants, grocery stores, and food service companies. A few other food rescue apps like FlashFood and Food Rescue Hero are focused on saving food from grocery retailers. Online grocers Misfits Markets and Imperfect Produce rescue products that aren’t visually fit for retailers. While Too Good To Go also works with grocery retailers, it is one of the few companies to focus on preventing food waste from restaurants.

Both the Too Good To Go and Waze app is available for free on iOS and Android phones.

Waze Helps You Locate Food Pantries as well as Drive-Thrus and Curbside Pickups

People who have lost their jobs or are otherwise impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic most likely know that help is out there. Today Waze, the crowdsourced map + best optimizing app announced a new feature to let people know where that help is.

In a corporate blog post, Waze, which is a subsidiary of Google, announced how it has partnered with WhyHunger and No Kid Hungry “to add more than 30,000 emergency food distribution locations to the U.S. map.”

Additionally, the service has invited local public agencies to share information about food distribution locations (as well as medical testing centers, road closure information, etc.) through Waze’s COVID-19 landing page.

On a less humanitarian, but no less useful front, Waze also introduced new types of Location Personality badges so restaurants and other businesses advertising on the Waze platform can identify whether they offer drive-thru and/or curbside pickup. For those still out on the roads and looking for food, they can search and filter results based on how contactless they want to go when it comes to getting their meals.

As always, we here at The Spoon want to provide news that doesn’t just inform, but also helps you navigate this unprecedented time, especially as it relates to food. Whether that’s helping you support local restaurants without endangering anyone’s health, helping small businesses understand the Paycheck Protection Program, or just helping you find an alternative to impossible-to-find yeast, hopefully you can consider The Spoon a useful resource. If you know of startups or community organizations finding innovative solutions to help those in need of food right now, drop us a line and let us know.