Too Good To Go App Gives Customer a Smashed Cake: "We Still Ate It."

Food waste in the restaurant industry is a big problem. Restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores often throw out unsold food, contributing to tens of billions of pounds of food waste in the U.S. each year.

The app Too Good To Go was launched in the U.S. in 2020 to help reduce food waste. The app allows consumers to buy “Surprise Bags” from local restaurants that contain unsold food items. Users of the app have scored baked goods from Panera, whole pizzas, or even whole rotisserie chickens. However, some users have been disappointed from their Too Good To Go surprise bags — including a group who got a cake that was essentially smushed to a pulp.

TikTok creator @allyy.kattt posted a video on Aug. 2 of a Too Good To Go fail that happened when her friend used the app to order a surprise bag from a local bakery. The short seven-second video shows a pile of smashed-up cake in the middle of a table.

“My friend did ‘Too Good To Go’ thinking she’d get assorted pastries, and they gave her 7 lbs of cake smashed together,” reads text on the video.

The clip is set to an audio of Kris Jenner saying “To be honest, I don’t know what happened, but we need a redo.”

However, in the video’s description, Ally admits that she and her friends still ate the smashed-up cake.

"But ofc we still ate it!" she captioned the clip. "This made me laugh so hard."

By then end of the video, it’s clear that a good portion of the smashed cake is gone.

One commenter said that the same thing happened to them once. “I got that once too, I was so disappointed but the second I tried it, all the complaints were gone and I was just eating plain cake all day,” they wrote.

Several people commented that the smashed cake could be used to make cake pops.

In general, most of the commenters loved this Too Good To Go cake fail, and had nothing but good things to say about the app.

While the contents of some Too Good To Go users’ surprise bags may not be what they were expecting, the app is still succeeding in its mission to reduce food waste. As of May 2023, the company claims it has saved more than 5.5 million meals in the U.S. from being thrown out; the app has also partnered with more than 11,000 restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores and saved its users about $50 million.

For Too Good To Go users, they can snag unsold foods at a third of the cost of its retail value. In the app, users can select what type of food they want in their “Surprise Bag,” such as pizza, grocery items, whole meals, or vegan foods.

"Too Good To Go provides a win-win-win solution by giving consumers a chance to snag delicious surplus at great value, store owners the opportunity to profit and recoup costs from fresh food that would otherwise be tossed, and everyone involved the ability to work together to build a greener planet by reducing food waste and CO2 emissions," Too Good To Go co-found Lucie Basch told Green Matters in a 2021 exclusive interview.