It has recently arrived in Italy and is called Too Good To Go. We are talking about the app that allows anyone to actively participate in the fight against food waste and, at the same time, to save on food purchases. In short, the proverbial two birds with one stone.
Designed in 2015 in Denmark, the app, which today counts almost 9 million users, is already present in 9 other European countries and is among the top positions in the App Store and Google Play across the Old Continent. Now, to expand its already large anti-waste network, Too Good To Go is available for Italian phones.

How does it work

The "magic" formula is this: Magic Box. Merchants of fresh produce and restaurateurs registered with the application can put up for sale bag (the Magic Box, in fact) with a surprise selection of fresh products and dishes that remained unsold at the end of the day and that cannot be put back on sale the next day. No waste of food, for the good of all, and an economic return, albeit small, as an advantage for sellers.
On the other hand, the users / consumers who, with their purchases, participate in the reduction of food waste and buy with a simple tap on the application excellent meals at minimum prices, between 2 and 6 Euros.

Once you download the app (free) on your smartphone, and complete simple registration procedures, just geolocate and search for the nearest local members, order your Magic Box, pay it through the app and pick it up in the time slot specified for find out what's inside.

So the Earth is also helped

About a billion and 300 thousand tons of food are thrown away every year. To understand: if food waste were a country, they would be the third largest producer of greenhouse gases, also considering all the resources needed to produce food (FAO data). And the forecasts for the future are really worrying: by 2030 it will reach 1.2 trillion food wasted every year.
And in Italy? Well, we are certainly not the first of the class considering that every year over 10 million tons of food are thrown, equal to about 15 billion euros a year (Waste Watcher report 2019).

Ok, of course it won't be a smartphone app to remedy this situation, but somewhere you need to start. And they need intelligence and good will. Thus, on balance, it was found that each purchased Magic Box avoids the emission of 2 kg of Co2. To date, more than 11 million Magic Boxes have been purchased in Europe, which has allowed the environment to avoid the emission of more than almost 23 million tons of CO2 (calculation source: EPA – United States Environmental Protection Agency). Furthermore, in order not to limit oneself to just food, but to operate in a wider ecological vision, to limit the use of packaging, Too Good To Go stores will encourage customers to bring their own containers and bags from home.

Too Good To Go in Italy

Recently arrived in our country, Too Good To Go has already received the approval of many operators: from small artisan shops, bars and pastry shops to large retail chains. In Milan, the city from which the app was first tested, Tramezzini Veneziani di Tramè, the artisan Le Polveri micro-factory and the Eataly Smeraldo sales point, joined the event; but also the organic EXKi restaurants and Carrefour Italia stores. But the list of businesses that appears on the Too Good To Go screen gets longer every day. For the rest of Italy, the application activation program will take place in stages: in a month it will be the turn of Turin; to follow, the aim is to cover the main Italian cities within a few months.