Here's how you can get fresh food at a reduced price in Springfield
In a time when grocery bills are going up and spending $10 on lunch is getting tiring, a resourceful app from across the seas has made its way to Springfield and is helping stores rescue good food while offering a deal for customers.
Too Good To Go, an app working with participating businesses to create reduced price bags of food with limited shelf life, was founded in 2016 in Copenhagen to fight food waste.
The app finally hit Springfield in early June through a new partnership with Circle K gas and grocery stores across the Capital City, offering up to two bags at a time.
How does it work?
The bags are sold at 25-50% of their contents' original retail value. At Circle K each bag costs $3.99 before tax and tends to include anywhere from five to seven items.
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What’s in a bag?
Each store through the app offers two surprise bags at a time, with an assortment of really anything perishable left unsold.
The State Journal-Register investigated just how much someone can save with these bags and if the food is still good to eat.
Here's a list of items that were included in a bag picked up at the Circle K on North Grand Avenue:
Circle K brand hot cheddar flavored popcorn, $1.99
Cheesewich salami and Colby jack, $3.99
Circle K Buffalo style chicken salad wrap, $2.49
Kitchen Fresh PBJ sandwich, $1.99
Cracker Barrel extra sharp yellow cheese, $1.99
Circle K Kong breakfast sandwich, $3.99
Chobani Greek yogurt drink, $2.99
The price alone of the sandwich is enough to recuperate the cost of the bag, which is more than enough for a lunch and a snack afterwards. Checking all the dates, none of the food was past expiration date, the closest to the sell-by date was the sandwich, which was one week from spoiling.
The manager on site said the stores are supposed to create around two bags a day, but since most people don’t know about the partnership with Too Good To Go still, only two or three bags had been sold in the past three weeks.
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To follow up, a second bag was picked up at 2700 Stevenson Drive. The bag contained two pickles, two eggs, an apple pie, onion rings, the recurring buffalo chicken wrap and a full ranch chicken salad sandwich.
According to the manager, bags are created with a $12 cap in mind, placing products which will be going bad first and then building up a meal with the spending cap.
In the second bag, the pickles had reached their sell by date two days earlier, but every other item was still in its prime.
Helping businesses and customers
Aside from selling perishable food, according to Too Good To Go, 41% of customers purchased additional items alongside their surprise bag, which brings more foot traffic and revenue into the shop.
The app also offers intelligent discounting to optimize discounts for items going out of date soon and offer recommendations on what to do with items. The app may recommend printing a discount sticker at an optimized discount rate to sell in-store, create a surprise bag to sell on the app, or donate depending on the item.
Since creation, the goal of Too Good To Go has been reducing food waste and hunger while improving eco-friendly initiatives.
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In eight years, the company has grown to over 90 million registered users and 155,000 active business partners across 17 countries in Europe and North America, making the company the world's largest marketplace for surplus food.
Since 2016, the app has helped to save over 300 million meals from being wasted, the equivalent of 893,000 tons of CO2e avoided. One meal in a bag can save 5.9 pounds of CO2e emissions, 30.1 square feet of land used in agriculture per year and 214 gallons of water, according to an impact report in 2023.
The app is downloadable on iOS, Google Play store and App Gallery for Huawei phones.
Claire Grant writes about business, growth and development and other news topics for the State Journal-Register. She can be reached at [email protected]; and on X (Formerly known as Twitter): @Claire_Granted
This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Too Good To Go launches in Springfield. Here's how it works
