After building a steady presence across social media and in local communities, surplus food app Too Good To Go is looking to attract its next wave of customers and partners, while retaining its roots as a sustainable business.

The app works by partnering with supermarkets and restaurants to reduce food waste by selling surprise bags of surplus food to customers at a reduced price. The customer then goes to pick up the bag at a set collection time.

Since being founded in Denmark in 2015, the company has expanded globally, securing partnerships with a number of national and local brands and launching in the UK in 2016. Since launch, it has saved over 500 million meals.

Having established the brand and proven the concept, Too Good To Go is now looking to drive its next phase of growth. Enter CMO Federico Vazquez, who joined the business last month. With a background in food delivery apps, including DeliveryHero and FoodPanda, he has over 20 years of experience growing marketplace-based businesses.

“The first thing I want to do is give Too Good to Go the space it deserves as a brand to grow,” he says. “It deserves more resonance.”

In order to drive growth, building mental availability is going to be key, Vazquez says. Rather than being a “plan B”, Too Good To Go wants to be top of mind when customers are making food choices.

“We want to be part of your daily lives,” he explains. “A brand you consider at key points in the day when buying food.”

“It’s not a plan B. We want people buying from shops or ordering to be the plan B,” he adds.

Education is naturally a big part of this. Vazquez describes the initial stage of education as being focused on how the app works and the proposition itself, while the “second layer” aims to make consumers more conscious of food waste generally, so that people factor it into food buying decisions more regularly.

The bolder we speak as a brand, the bolder our marketing, the more we have the chance to actually make a positive impact.

Federico Vazquez, Too Good To Go

The brand has several impact programmes to raise awareness of the problem across a broad range of demographics. Its ‘Look-Smell-Taste’ programme aims to educate the public about the difference between ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ dates, making the public more open to consuming and using food that may otherwise be wasted.

A focus on education is also the driving force behind its upcoming ‘United Against Food Waste’ campaign, which is launching later this year. While still in its “early stages”, the campaign aims to take a global yet localised approach to addressing this issue. At the same time, Too Good To Go also plans to add new features to the app.

“[Some] people fight against food waste because of environmental reasons, others fight against food waste because of food insecurity, depending on the country where you are. But we’re all very conscious of the problem and we need to find common ground,” Vazquez asserts.

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He says there is always a “trade-off” when running a global campaign, because while it may be more efficient, he believes there is a risk a campaign “will lose local relevance” and therefore mean a brand “doesn’t fully resonate”.

“The way we speak to a customer in the UK is different from the way we would speak to a customer in France… every country will have the freedom to express themselves in their own way,” he states.

So, while each campaign will fall “under the same umbrella” different strategies will be employed by each local market to address specific food waste concerns.

When it comes to measuring success, Vazquez says Too Good To Go measures everything in terms of its positive impact on the environment; by number of bags saved, by number of tonnes of CO2 reduced, rather than growth as a percentage.

“Everything that Too Good To Go is, it’s deeply ingrained into emissions,” he says. “[It’s] all dependent on how much we can enlarge our impact.”

The impact of UGC

Although the brand itself is usually quiet in terms of traditional above-the-line marketing, its presence has remained strong across social media thanks to a growing trend of people posting their Too Good To Go hauls.

“It’s our main driver of growth,” Vasquez says.

Currently, the hashtag #TooGoodToGo sits at around 160,000 posts on Instagram and 80,000 on TikTok. However, unlike a lot of brands, most of this engagement is organic, he says, rather than as a result of paid for influencer activity.

As a marketer, “you dream about having a situation like that”, he says. “Especially when [the feedback] we have received has been so genuine. I believe it’s an amazing marketing gift.”

He suggests “customers are more trusting of non-influencers”, which has allowed the brand to grow organically and retain its community feel.

This word-of-mouth approach has been successful for the brand so far, however it has not been entirely without problems. While many customers post about the great value of their surprise bags, some have posted when things go wrong, such as food that has been poorly packaged or too far past its expiration date.

The nature of social media means that you cannot control what people post, but Vazquez believes his team “shouldn’t be afraid of” negative viral posts. The marketing team does have a system in place to help manage any negativity by directing the user to its customer support.

“There are a lot of unexpected factors in the emission of fighting and food waste and things can go wrong, but it is a small minority,” he states.

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Targeting new partners

Given how important the quality of food is to its overall proposition, this is something Too Good To Go must reinforce with its partner restaurants and supermarkets.

It is also going to be crucial the business and its partners adhere to these strict quality measures as it looks to expand.  The business does have an automated framework in place to help businesses manage expiry dates and surplus product to mitigate errors, however working with a greater number of retailers and reaching a wider audience could create more challenges.

Too Good To Go is not going after any particular type of food seller as it looks to expand. Vazquez appreciates the amount of business it can bring these partners is “limited” compared to a food delivery app, for example, so there will be less profit to be derived from these partnerships, he says.

So instead the brand positions itself “not just as a facilitator” of monetising food waste but as a means to “attract clientele” for the businesses it works with, who would later go on to buy full-price items once they have tried these more economical samples.

In his mind, it is all about being “bold”. “The bolder we speak as a brand, the bolder our marketing, the more we have the chance to actually make a positive impact,” he says.

“Regardless of the media or regardless of what we’re doing, we should be OK with the fact that we’re for a lot of people, but we may not be for everyone.”