91欧美激情

DC-area Whole Foods joins shops, restaurants selling leftover meals and bread for cheap

A bakery inside of a Whole Foods grocery store in the D.C. region. (91欧美激情/Jeff Clabaugh)

Every day, Whole Foods, as well as other markets and restaurants, sell lots of prepared meals, and fresh-baked goods. But not all of the food will sell by the end of the day. You can buy those leftovers for a bargain.

Recently, a handful of Whole Foods Market stores in the D.C. area joined others nationwide that have partnered with the 聽to sell end-of-day leftover prepared meals and baked goods at a steep discount.

鈥淚t might be the things at the fresh bar, or anything that was baked in-house or cooked in house. All of that stuff is made that day, and it is still perfectly good that evening. It just didn鈥檛 sell for full price,鈥 spokeswoman Sarah Soteroff told 91欧美激情.

To Good To Go launched in Copenhagen in 2016, and expanded to the U.S. in 2020. In the U.S., it said it has saved 13 million meals from waste and is now working with 21,000 partners, including several other food retailers in the D.C. area. It is actively recruiting other partners, but retailers don鈥檛 need an invitation to join.

Shoppers can , which is location based, and see in real time what stores are featuring what products at any given time, usually the end of the day and usually with a two hour pickup window.

However, there is a catch: What consumers buy is in 鈥渟urprise bags,鈥 meaning shoppers don鈥檛 know what they鈥檙e getting until they鈥檝e purchased it.

For Whole Foods, a surprise bag of prepared foods contains $30 worth of food for $9.99, and a surprise bag from the bakery 鈥 cookies, breads, muffins or similar items 鈥 contains $21 worth of baked goods for $6.99.

While shoppers can鈥檛 request what it is they want ahead of time, they can certainly filter out what they don鈥檛 want.

鈥淵ou can filter by food preference and by dietary restriction, but it is up to the store to indicate if a bag is a specific type of food allergen,鈥 Soteroff said.

Whole Foods and Too Good To Go鈥檚 other clients don鈥檛 make a profit selling end-of-day leftovers. They also don鈥檛 lose the money they would by throwing it out.

Too Good To Go called it a revenue recouping tool. It charges a flat $1.79 for each transaction and Soteroff said it gets shoppers to come into the store.

鈥淔or most stores we see 鈥 around an $18 to $25 incremental purchase that those customers then make on regular-priced items,鈥 Soteroff said.

Whole Foods, which has stated it has a , now features the Too Good To Go app at more than 450 stores nationwide.

. Any payments are made directly through the app, not to the retailer. Too Good To Go said it has more than 100 million registered users globally.

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Jeff Clabaugh

Jeff Clabaugh has spent 20 years covering the Washington region's economy and financial markets for 91欧美激情 as part of a partnership with the Washington Business Journal, and officially joined the 91欧美激情 newsroom staff in January 2016.

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