The winner for best transactional app in recent years was the international application Too Good to Go. Che more we know the project, the more we like it. A business with a mission as clear as preventing food from being thrown away. How can you not like it?
But the execution could be difficult. What if customers don’t buy from me to wait for the discount at Too Good to Go? It doesn’t happen, because they are surprise packs, limited in time. And with this they are achieving tremendous results, with a very simple operation for the user, focused on their mobile application. We are going to get to know him in depth with his global director of Marketing operations, who is in Spain, Jonathan Zarzalejo.
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Interview to Jonathan Zarzalejo
6:08 What is Too Good To Go?
A Danish project, it was born in 2016. It grew very fast and we launched in Spain in 2018. At that time I was the director of marketing in Spain and we launched a model. The Country Manager and I formed a team and gradually grew to what we are now.
The creators were at a buffet in Copenhagen and they watched trays of food, fresh from the kitchen, being dumped. That’s when the light bulb went on and they created the Too Good To Go application. This App allows establishments that have food, from restaurants to supermarkets, bakeries or small food stores to give it another chance.
The establishments know what the turnover is but they do not know how much food they throw away or do not sell. We give them the opportunity to create surprise packs. Any user downloads the app, registers, geolocates and sees what establishments are around. You look for what you want, you pay a third of the real value in the application, you go at the time established by the establishment, present the receipt and collect your surprise pack.
8:00 The barrier I see is that companies are afraid of the expectations that people prefer to buy that surprise pack than full price food. How did you manage it?
When we launched 3 years ago we saw that there were many establishments that were afraid to say that they were throwing food away, We are all aware that at the end of the day there is a lot of food that is thrown away. There are other establishments that donate that food, but others for cold chain reasons cannot donate it.
Our role was to make the establishment understand that this fear was normal but that it was something that everyone knows, it is worse not to say anything and much worse to throw away the food. We also explained that we did not cannibalize, our model goes against the trends. We are in a time of delivery and our model took the user to the establishment allowing them to meet new customers, show your product and create cross-selling.
The concept of surprise pack you do not know what it will contain, you know where it comes from and what type of product it may be but not what it really is. For example, you can ask a sushi restaurant for a surprise pack, but until you have it you won’t know if it’s maki, California or a mix of everything.
Sometimes we make vertical surprise packs, they have asked us a lot to become vegan and vegetarian, because if you buy a surprise pack you want to eat something that you know you can consume.
12:35 Where are you currently?
We are in many towns and cities, our ambition is to be in any big city and town. When we launched 3 years ago we started in Madrid and Barcelona, then we went to Bilbao and Salamanca. We are currently throughout the peninsula and the islands, just in December we arrived in Gran Canaria and Tenerife. It depends on the demand and supply that we have, there are many establishments that call us small towns.
14:50 How many are you? How do you divide your profiles?
We are in 17 countries, 15 of them in Europe. A year ago we jumped the pond and started in the US and Canada. In the end, the company is large, globally we are 1,300 people, in Spain we are 130 people, It’s not bad at all if you think that 3 years ago there were only 2 of us.
We have the team divided in 4, the marketing, sales, success team that measures the quality of the establishments and the relationship with the client and the HR department. It should be noted that the success team pampers both the end customer and the establishment. You have to understand both very well to solve any problem and that both are happy. A quality control that guarantees that everything is perfect.
18:30 How many establishments do you have in Spain? And users?
Right now in Spain we have 14,000 establishments throughout the country. With a wide variety of large surfaces to small premises. We have 4 million registered users. We had a capture phase, which we still maintain, but now we are in a phase of how we can continue to retain and activate. Our metric is based on how many times the app is opened and we break it down by region.
We analyze a lot the “if you open it but don’t end up buying it, it’s because we don’t have the right offer or maybe we haven’t communicated it well”. We want to analyze well all the processes and possibilities.
21:30 What would big companies like or Danone be like as producers of Too Good To Go?
It is part of the evolution of the product, we started with small businesses, but we were expanding verticals. One of them was that of producers and manufacturers. danone It has a lot of products that are in supermarkets that are going to reach best-before dates, which is not the same as an expiration date, and due to supermarket policies they have to withdraw them from sale. It is still suitable for consumption, as we give it an outlet with our app.
Another example would be mislabeled or beaten products that cannot be sold but are in perfect condition and can be consumed perfectly. Our goal is that there is no food waste.
26:00 Who is using this app?
We had in mind that ours was a middle-aged woman who saves food when leaving work, in a simplified way, that was the main profile. Due to the pandemic our way of consuming has changed a lot, we continue to analyze and learn.
It is also used by young people and students who live in university towns and can help a lot to do their shopping for the week. Families who want to have habits and save in the shopping cart. EITHER very environmentally conscious people who understand that more than a third of the food produced in the world is thrown away, we produce food for the garbage can.
People who are really concerned about ecology and want to do things, that is the main user and user of Too Good To God. We play with those profiles that want to act well and have an economic benefit. The user wins and the environment wins.
28:00 Do you have the data on kilos of food saved last year?
Last year in Spain, at the level of food packs, we sold 3.8 million. More or less each pack is 1 kg of food, so we have saved 3,800 tons of food. Another fact is that for each pack saved in Too Good To Go would be equivalent to 2.5 kg of CO2 equivalent, we have saved the atmosphere in 2021 9,500 tons of Co2.
To better understand this, it is equivalent to 2,000 flights around the world.
36:30 What is your storytelling to create the content?
Since we launched in all countries we have gone through trial and error, seeing what works best. It is not something that bothers us a lot, we use the networks to tell stories and the content that works for us is the recipes with food that is used. We make content from our partners, establishments that work with us, we work with them to give advice and make the use visible.
As we have 17 countries we have 17 teams. Each one looks at what works locally, but if we see that content works in a country, we try to replicate it to see if it works too. Our global job is to learn all learnings.
We explain graphically what it means to throw food, for example, throwing a banana is like 10 minutes of hot water. Teach the little ones by going to the cabbages how to take advantage of food and everything that goes into producing food and getting it to our home.
41:00 At the Ecommerce Awards 2021 you won the award for the best mobile app, competing with two big ones like and Futbol Emotion. Do you know their cases? Is there something you would keep from your applications?
We have won several awards in the last 3 years, but we always go with no expectations. We did not expect to win, especially competing against two greats. Above all, compete with Aliexpress, which is overwhelming as it is one of the most popular eCommerce.
The 3 of us are different and we are capable of winning an award, sometimes it is to be lucky enough to see that what you have created is changing consumption and people
48:30 And finally, what are the challenges in 2022? Where is the next level of Too Good To Go?
On a global level, we continue to open markets, we have nothing defined, first we want to win where we are, conquer the US and Canada. In the case of Spain, we want to achieve more establishments and producers, if in 2021 we save 3.8 million meals, this year we want to save 5 million meals.
Our ambition is continue to grow at a business level and at a brand level that people understand that people understand the impact of throwing away food.
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