Too Good To Go: End Food Waste

I use this app all the time. I’ve looked at some reviews complaining that sometimes shops don’t have their food or that they don’t get what they ordered. While these are valid points, they are not the usual experience. I ordered hundreds of bags over a year, only twice I got to a place that was closed, 2-3 times the shop didn’t have the bag (it was a mistake in the system) and maybe another 2-3 times the bag was cancelled before I collected it or the collection time has changed. In terms of being satisfied with what you are going to get, as long as you don’t have any allergies and you are not picky about your food, you can follow the ratings system. If you are picky, you can still use it, but buy only from vendors that always give you the same thing. E.g. most sushi places will give you sushi, Starbucks split their food and cakes into separate offerings etc. If I could wish for one feature, it would be the ability to order my lists (including favourites) by start and end time of collection. I know I can filter on it, but sometimes I would like to quickly see what I can get now vs. what I can get if I wait a bit. It might not be important for a casual user, but when someone schedules their lunches based on TGTG, it is handy.

So I use the app and got my discounted leftover food. It’s now five days from picking up and I’ve yet to be able to review the experience per the metrics that are shown on each vendors offerings. How is it that a app that is all about the experience and what you get and what you don’t get gives me no follow up as to what I thought, shows me no notifications or anything within the app to review the food quality, the food quantity, the experience, the value. I’ve talked to two different people at customer service and been told two different things. I’ve been told that review chances come out once a week. That didn’t happen for me. I was also told that I could just go into my app and Choose to review after I picked up the item. There was never that option. The only thing I was able to do was answer one question about what I thought store overall so I chose that in the app thinking this was my time to review and all it did was ask me on a scale of one to five stars what the store itself which is irrelevant to the way this app works. So this app gets one star because if you can’t review what you’ve picked up and tried from the app, what is the point?

This is a great service that helps to fight food waste. It’s also a nice way to discover businesses in your area that you might not have known about and sample their offerings. However, the app itself could use some improvement. One issue is that there are some points in the day when the data in the app fail to load and you are stuck at looking at the animated Too Good To Go logo in a white box - sometimes this occurs in the middle of the night but I have also seen it take place during the middle of the day. I hope this never happens to me when I’m going to pick up an order and need to show it to someone in a store and swipe in the app to collect. Another issue is that the distances shown in the map are straight line (or “as the crow flies”) and don’t take into account the street grid or bodies of water such as rivers. While this approach might work fine for some areas it isn’t best suited for a dense urban environment where there are numerous businesses. Even when I have the filter set to the minimum 1 mile distance I see locations that are actually much further away because they would first require walking to a subway station or to a ferry landing to cross a river. I have found that it’s easier to judge distances by looking at the “Map” view instead of the “List” view under the “Browse” option, but there is no “Map” view available under your “Favorites”.