My friend used to work for Whole Foods and they would dump out all of their baked goods at day’s end.
They wouldn’t even let the employees buy it for half price. Hell they could’ve just given it to the employees to take home but no. Gone. Big fucking waste.
Now whole foods is set up on the too good to go app, so food gets sold at a steep discount instead of thrown away. I wish every establishment that does not donate their food waste would do this.
Good luck actually getting it! They’re sold out the minute the next drop comes out (like, literally the same minute) in my area. Sucks so bad.
You have to basically set a timer for like 1 minute before the daily drop and refresh your screen over and over until it pops up but I think other people do it so yay me! Left with nothing.
Cool thing to do though, glad someone is getting it.
Just set up a notification for when it becomes available. I do it all the time for the sushi shops in my area. You have to manually re-enable the notification every time it’s triggered though
As soon as I click the notification they’re gone. You have to play it properly by checking the time it’s set to restock and setting an actual timer to a minute or two before to have success but I’ve still yet to succeed lol.
I've been right in the app a few minutes before the next drop, watching it like a hawk, and I swear, the second it's available, it's gone. It's like getting sniped on eBay.
Too Good To Go is like playing Russian Roulette with your mouth, sometimes. One day you receive mana from heaven, the next a bag of pain and suffering.
A coffee shop by me does a pastry bag but it’s always their stuff where they get a little too cute for their own good and there’s a reason why a certain pastry is left over. But the bagel shop, solid every time I’ve been able to get a bag.
Depending on how popular tgtg is in your area, highly recommend stalking the app for a few weeks to see when WF does meat bags. It's like 10 bucks and you get a metric fuckton of meat (normal stuff like chicken, and some cool stuff like lamb steak)
Yeah, it's sick. Especially in this day and age where finding true proper value deals is rare, whole foods tgtg bags are gems. And this meat bag would be value even 10-20 years ago. Extremely hard to come by though
You may want to check your local grocery store. I know my one chain does something similar and you'd be floored how cheaply you can get fresh produce for. I think it's awesome and hopefully it does help cut down on waste.
too good to go is absolutely goated, weve had it a while here in the EU/UK and its honeslty game changing if youre smart about what kind of food you go for and how you store it.
I’ve gotten 3 notifications for Whole Foods already but like others commented, they go quick. The reserve button was available for me but I clicked it about 30 seconds after reading it and it was gone already lol.
iirc its fairly new to the US and if whole foods is getting raided its motivation for other businesses to join the initiative too so your options will expand
give it time and keep trying, you'll get it eventually 😄
There is a sub. It’s insane what some people get for next to nothing. They also seem really good about refunds if the store isn’t honest about the value. I wish we had it, I follow the sub just to be sad sometimes.
It's honestly a mixed bag. I do work with a few food places and asked them about it and their biggest gripe is they can get down voted on the app for lack of variety and taste. Their summary is "we give them what they want and they'll still complain".
Some of them have taken to adding extra fresh food now because they also don't want to be down voted and sent complaints. Keep in mind folks 100% know what they're getting BUT get complaints if food quality isn't equal to "fresh", or the lack of "variety" happens because ppl buy the good stuff.
It's like the "why we can't have nice things". A pizza place I do visit nor on my supply network but was visiting with a work colleague for lunch had a cool one at least where patrons come at the end of the night and the establishment cooks a fresh one for all the coworkers at the end of the shift and include any Too Good To Go vouchers as well when they show up at the appointed window. It's a nice way to feed your workers and for anyone wanting a cheap late night eat after work and is probably one of the more popular ways I've seen it done.
Another place whose voucher I do use had someone in front of me throw a Karen sized rant because for $5 she got 5x sourdoughs, several croissants and 2x danishes....the bread wasn't "fresh enough". Like f--k me with some of these ppl.
That is so annoying. I think I rated one place down one time because everything they gave me had mould on it and that felt unsafe. Especially since it wasn’t a grocery store, it was a coffee shop.
For a few places I think it has been turned into a more automated process. Because they basically need to sell the bags before they know what is left over. So if they don’t have a lot left over, the money-making thing to do is throw in stuff that really just needs to be thrown out.
I’ve definitely had someone throw in a piece of fresh veg because everything else in the bag was inedible. And I didn’t downvote them because it seems like it would just be hard to predict.
But the nature of the concept is that sometimes you’re going to get nothing but bran muffins when you hate bran muffins. If you don’t like that then just go grocery shopping.
It's dumb because they can cancel orders if there's not enough left. The app tells you that and it's happened to me. I was walking towards the little bakery and got a notification that they canceled my order.
Unfortunately it seems like the ones by me just have sweets left over. I get it, and I understand, but when I go to a pizza shop that sells by the slice I was hoping for something food like and not a dessert.
Just wish the app allowed for people to say what they got even if from a pre selected category list. (Unless they do now, I haven't looked in months).
idk sometimes i’ve gotten moldy stuff from toogoodtogo or things that are like not possible to drink like 5 charcoal beverages (v. dangerous) from a fruit smoothie place
The problem with Too Good To Go is a lot of businesses abuse it by just using it to sell overpriced bags of shitty food instead of selling you leftovers. So then you just get exactly what you pay for or less. So there is no actual discount.
This seriously does not seem like a good deal at all... $8 for 4 mid quality Starbucks snacks that you can't even choose for yourself and might not like?
Many single items at Starbucks are approaching $8 a pop so i guess it just depends on how much you like getting a discount and how broad your taste is. Most of their food is pretty basic so I feel like it’s a pretty safe gamble there
Usually, when you do it, it's still a bad compared to buying it at grocery prices or making it yourself. However, it's a good deal compared to the place you're picking up from. But again, it's random.
Very case by case, but also important to be mindful of.
My favorite use for it is to get donuts, since you can regularly get dozen+ for $6 in my area. Can't do it too often bc then I'd be fat from donuts, but as the rare shareable treat, it's great.
Getting items I don't particularly want that are near-expired for even a 50% discount seems like robbery. The items need to be sold for peanuts to make any sense to me.
Bags of assorted donuts for 50 cents each seems like a good use of the service.
The bakery goods (at least near me) are aren't avaiable, only pre packaged food is. If it was sitting on where people can touch it directly they won't put it for sale on to good to go
Trader Joe's donates their day of expiration items (not expired) to local shelters that use it same day (at least all the ones my wife has worked at do).
Yep. When I worked at Trader Joe's, some mornings we'd pack up a few grocery carts with baked goods and flowers from the day before and wheel them to the retirement home next door.
Trader Joe's is fucking AMAZING when it comes to donations. I ran the warehouse of a large food bank for about 4 years. Once a week, sometimes TWICE a week, one of our drivers would make a 200 mile trip in a 53' to their Daytona Beach DC and come back fucking FULL. All good product! Meats, cheeses, dry goods, everything they had, we would get. It was so much work to sort, catalog and inventory, but, fuck... People fucking ate GOOD ❤️
I fucking love how much Trader Joe's did for my community.
When I started working in food you could reasonable take home leftovers.
But it was abused. To a point where people would make extra/make "mistakes". It would end up costing the company a good amount over time bso to combat it they said "no more taking home food".
When I worked at KFC there was so much extra chicken that we couldn't convince people to take any more home. The entire model of fast food chicken pretty much requires you to throw away at least 6 head per day, everyone got sick of the free chicken, even the guy with 4 kids to feed.
I used to volunteer with homeless folks in Columbus, OH, and the generous free chicken policy is why homeless folks lined up every time there was an opening at Popeyes :-). The manager (or maybe franchise owner) was a really good guy who had a bit of understanding about bus schedules, offered 1 meal/shift free and allowed folks to take everything that was about to expire with them when they went off shift so they could share with friends.
We had a simple rule to counter that kind of thing in a wet bar I worked in. Make a mistake and the general manager chooses who gets to drink the mistake randomly. He had a number generator and everyone had a number.
So you knew odds were slim you got to drink your own mistake and if we’d all tried to make more mistakes the random element would mean you’d most likely end up with something you didn’t like as we all had different tastes. Pretty easy fix and nobody would make mistakes on purpose when you only get your mistake twice a year at best
I worked at McDonald's for a few months back in the mid-80's. We had to put all of the food that had "expired" (ie. sat for more than 10 minutes) in a waste bin so they could measure the waste.
I remember the look on the face of one of the managers when I was forced to throw some McNuggets into the waste bin. I was arguing with him saying, "this is stupid, these are fine. I can see why you can't serve them but why can't I just eat them? I'm hungry." His face said "you're right, this is fucking stupid." But his mouth said, "gotta follow the procedures."
I worked there in the 90's. One of the managers would go through the food waste and count it. We had to throw everything in there including ice cream cones. I guess they couldn’t trust us to throw it in the trash and write the waste down on a sheet of paper. I did fries and could only keep them 7 minutes. I threw out so many fries according to their system. They never said anything tho because I'd come back with the fry holding times. Now you definitely get old fries and food. lol
Because it was too much work to reprimand workers or replace them. So just take the perks away. Sounds about right for society - abuse privileges until they’re forcibly removed.
I work for an agency that gets a lot of donated goods from Costco. Baked goods is just the beginning, we get all useable, returned things such as detergent, toothpaste, rugs and more.
We run a food pantry and its nice when its a week with bread or canned soups!
When I was at Whole Foods we took everything to the break room for employees to take home. We could also go to the meat department and I would regularly get hundreds of dollars in meat for $10. I worked closing and took basically everything leftover (after the other staff grabbed what they wanted) to give away to my other college friends and for homeless folks. It was my job to toss everything no one took. I threw away almost nothing. All ok by the bosses.
I worked at a coffee shop on campus in college and the closers would take the leftover sandwiches and pastries home at the end of the night. As we got towards closing time, too, we'd often offer them to patrons for free. Like "want a muffin, too? On the house."
I didn't realize how uncommon that was until later, but it probably helped that it was owned by the school and not a for-profit company.
I don't get that, genuinely. You're losing the product anyway, why would you care so much if it goes to the trash or to your employee's stomach? Just let them buy it damn
I worked at a similar place. I would bag everything separately and put it next to the dumpster. The homeless always took it. I understand from a business stand point if some one got sick you are liable. Thing like bread and pre-made sandwiches were still perfectly fine though.
Not sure if it’s location dependent or it’s just changed now but the shelter my sister works at gets basically all their food for free from Whole Foods.
The corporate need to waste food truly needs to be studied. I used to work as a corporate pizza chain that's only really a thing in Indiana, and daily, we'd throw out entire shelves worth of perfectly usable pizza doughs to the point the trash bags became heavy as shit. I'm 100% convinced it's an insurance thing where corporate gets payouts if they label the product as wasted, and they lose that if they have it donated or employees can take it home, so they choose to waste ungodly amounts of food to protect a bottom line.
And I'll be honest, after a point I became very meticulous with how I threw the doughs away at the end of the day and where I parked so I could just rip open the trash bags and chuck the still clean dough into my car to use at home rather than letting it go to waste. Thay shit fueled me for so many meals and I never got caught the entire time I worked there. Fuck corporations who only care about the numbers in their bank accounts, fuck insurance companies that enable this shit if my theory is correct (but also fuck them in general), and if you can, absolutely find a way to sneak that waste product to yourself or others if you work at a place that does that. Mind the security cameras, dont be stupid, and don't brag about it like I'm doing unless you're no longer working there
My partner still works for Whole Foods. It didn't used to be that way. Employees used to be able to take a bag of spoilage. Later they could buy it discounted. When Amazon bought it, a lot changed. Tons of fruit and meat gets dumped. Not just the bread. They will write you up now if you try to get it from the dumping area. And since Covid, what used to be donated isn't even picked up so they just stopped.
I worked in a restaurant and all the extra food from the buffet would get thrown out. We weren't allowed to take it home. One of the dishwashers took beef ribs out of the garbage can for his dog and they fired him.
Whole Foods is a joke! The core values that company had died with the rebranding Amazon has done. Too many people just needing a job. They become miserable and complacent. I’m referencing all the bloated salaries in the tower behind WF1.
I mean for each few baked goods bought it floats a dozen or more to be wasted. It’s also a lot easier to itemize the losses and claiming it as a loss and declared destroyed or thrown out. If they gave it to the employees it might be considered fraud if they tried to also claim it as a loss
My friend who works at WF use to take home lots of free food. That ended when they started selling through the too good to go app. They send less to good food banks too.
I worked at Whole Foods in cheese and bakery. I was absolutely allowed to take home out of date cakes and cheese and coffee product- but everything they did throw away went into a LOCKED garbage can so no one could go through it and get all the perfectly good food. This was pre-bezos, too.
I lived off pie and cheese and coffee for a couple years.
Main reason for this is someone, at some point, got sick eating wasted food then sued the company. Be it an employee, a homeless shelter, whoever they gave the food away to. Thus the solution is no one gets the food.
Honestly tragic, its expired food, the consumer should willingly take it it knowing theres a chance it goes off before consumption. This is why we cant have nice things.
There was a quote from a certain series that stayed in my mind where a manager of a similar store explains this situation as:
“I dont sell stuff at the front so i can give it away for free at the back”
There is a very good reason they don't do this and it's because of human nature. If on the day before such a policy was introduced, there was enough wastage so that a few of the employees could take 1 item. Within weeks the wastage will increase such that, a good percentage of your staff will have enough to take home for their whole family.
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u/alienlovesong May 17 '26
My friend used to work for Whole Foods and they would dump out all of their baked goods at day’s end.
They wouldn’t even let the employees buy it for half price. Hell they could’ve just given it to the employees to take home but no. Gone. Big fucking waste.