HIBT Lab! Too Good To Go: Lucie Basch

Guy Raz (0:01)

Hello, and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So about 60% of all food waste in the US comes from restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, and food service companies. That's according to the nonprofit Feeding America. And so much of that food is really great. Every day, at the end of the day, most bakeries and cafes and restaurants throw away what's left. Some of them donate it if they can, but that's not always easy. So back in 2016, a young French entrepreneur named Lucie Basch joined forces with a group of Danish entrepreneurs to try and repurpose food that would otherwise get tossed. They found it too good to go, and it's a platform that connects restaurants with consumers, so sort of like airbnb for leftovers. A customer can log on to the app, order a surprise bag of food from their favorite bakery or cafe, usually for 5 or 6 bucks, and then go and pick up whatever's left at the end of the day. Too Good To Go is now in 17 countries, including in cities across the US. Lucie came to the idea after working at Nestlé in the UK, and while she was working on the production lines for chocolate bars and coffee capsules, she noticed a problem.

Lucie Basch (1:21)

At Nestlé, it's all about how can we produce faster and cheaper, and there is nothing around how can we improve the health of our consumers, how can we make it better for the environment, how can we make the food more nutritious. I remember working on KitKat and working on different type of pet foods or water bottles, and for all of them, it's the same principle, is that the line needs to run faster, we need to make sure that there is as much as possible, as many products as we can sell, and therefore even when we talk about waste, it's not really a problem in itself in terms of, it doesn't make sense to waste food, it's more a problem in itself because it costs more money. So really quickly I end up being in a place where I do projects that make us save tons of money, but often produce more waste because you would make the line run faster, and therefore there would be more defects, so more products that would end up being thrown away. But the marginal cost of every product is still lower, and therefore everyone is happy, and we celebrate that as a huge success for the factory. That's where really I started to realize that my values and what I was doing every day, it started to be a disconnect really.

Guy Raz (2:44)

What did you start to think about? I mean, what you say was a disconnect, and so what did you start to think about in terms of what you thought you wanted to do?

Lucie Basch (2:56)

I think at that time, I had always been sensitive to food waste, but really in the factory, I realized how huge the issue was.

We all see food waste in our daily lives, both in like when you go to a restaurant and you see people leaving stuff in their plates, or you go to the supermarkets and you see the bins filled with food. But that time, I realized that at the industrial level, it was even bigger. And then I started to look into numbers and start to get interested into food waste. And then I realized that today, we throw away 40% of the food we produce on the planet. And I don't know, but that number really hit me. And I was like, this is impossible to accept for me. And everyone should know about that number. And everyone should have ways to fight against it. And so the whole idea for me was, how can you make everyone a waste warrior? And how can you make everyone capable of fighting food waste? And that's when the idea of Too Good To Go started to emerge in my head slowly.

Guy Raz (4:07)

Right. So you have this idea in your head of like, is there a way that we could repurpose food from stores or restaurants that can't be sold anymore? Like what was the idea that you started to have in your head?

Lucie Basch (4:21)

So I've always been fascinated by what I call the horizontal power, where actually when every one of us, we do our little bits for a common cause, then we can have a huge impact together. And so it was this idea of like, if I make everyone able to save one meal every day, then we can really fight food waste at huge scale and really make a difference. So the idea was to use an app to enable every one of us to at the end of the day, pick up a meal and make sure that we can eat this food instead of throwing it away.