Too Good To Go, the Denmark-based company fighting food waste, recently announced that it had raised €6 million ($6.8 million) in internal funding.
I spoke with Javier Amigo Miranda, CMO of Too Good To Go (TGTG), who told me that the fundraise was powered by private investors, including Mike Lee, co-founder of fitness tracking app My Fitness Pal, with participation from TGTG’s own CEO and Chairman of the Board. Amigo Miranda told me that this latest funding brings TGTG’s total warchest to roughly €18 million ($20.4 million).
TGTG is essentially a surplus food marketplace. At the end of the day businesses can post leftover food on the TGTG app at a discount. Hungry people can use the consumer-facing side of the app to search local restaurants and grocery stores for surplus food, place an order, then swing by and pick up their discounted grub in a pre-set collection window.
TGTG currently serves 9 countries and has aspirations to expand to 16 by the end of the year. According to Amigo Miranda, the company has saved over 10 million meals from the landfill since it was founded in 2016.
Europe is becoming a hotbed surplus food rescuing companies. Winnow optimizes BOH kitchen operations to reduce food waste, and Olio facilitates free food surplus sharing among neighbors and businesses. TGTG’s biggest competitor is Karma, based across strait in Sweden, which also connects local restaurants with deal-hungry consumers looking to purchase leftover food at the end of the day.
TGTG may have a bigger reach than Karma — which is only available in the U.K. and Sweden — but the latter seems to be experimenting more widely with new marketplaces for surplus food. In August of last year Karma raised $12 million, and a few months later Karma partnered with Electrolux to install smart fridges in grocery stores filled with discounted surplus food. Hopefully TGTG will use some of its new funding to not just expand geographically, but also explore new ways to get excess food out of the landfill and onto consumers’ plates.
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