HIBT Lab! Too Good To Go: Lucie Basch

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Collaboration is the new competition: that was French entrepreneur Lucie Basch’s philosophy when she approached a group of Danish founders who happened to be working on a similar food waste reduction app.

Before long, Lucie and her new co-founders joined forces to create Too Good To Go, an app that enables restaurants and grocery stores to sell leftover items in ‘surprise bags’ at a significantly reduced price. Since launching in 2016, Too Good To Go has raised over $30 million dollars and has expanded to 17 countries, including the U.S.

This week on How I Built This Lab, Lucie talks with Guy about her company’s work to leverage the ‘horizontal power’ of consumers to collectively chip away at global food waste. She also discusses the emergence of social enterprises like hers, that fill the gap between charitable and purely profit-driven organizations.

This episode was produced by Sam Paulson, with music by Sam Paulson and Ramtin Arablouei.

Edited by John Isabella, with research help from Lauren Landau Einhorn.

Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.4	This is Chip Rantley, co-host of the NPR Podcast White Lives.
0:13.4	Before we found the man in Vancouver, before we sued the State Department, before we snuck
0:18.1	into the graveyard of a federal penitentiary, all we had were the photographs.
0:23.4	Photographs of a group of Cuban men standing on the roof of a prison in rural Alabama.
0:27.5	That's the season on the NPR Podcast White Lives.
0:31.6	Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab.
0:34.0	I'm Guy Razz.
0:35.4	So about 60% of all food waste in the U.S.
0:39.6	comes from restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, and food service companies.
0:44.6	That's according to the non-profit Feeding America.
0:47.6	And so much of that food is really great.
0:50.6	Every day, at the end of the day, most bakeries and cafes and restaurants throw away what's
0:56.9	left.
0:57.9	Some of them donate it if they can, but that's not always easy.
1:02.5	So back in 2016, a young French entrepreneur named Lucy Bash joined forces with a group
1:07.6	of Danish entrepreneurs to try and repurpose food that would otherwise get tossed.
1:13.4	They found it too good to go, and it's a platform that connects restaurants with consumers,
1:18.6	so sort of like Airbnb for leftovers.
1:22.0	A customer can log onto the app, order a surprise bag of food from their favorite bakery or cafe,
1:28.9	usually for five or six bucks, and then go and pick up what ever's left at the end of
	...

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