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Google employees angered by 'hypocritical' remote work policies * The exterior of Fiddleheads Cafe in Mendocino, Calif. After months of controversy, notorious Mendocino cafe to close Food Food waste app Too Good To Go saves leftovers from San Francisco restaurants Tessa McLean, SFGATE July 9, 2021Updated: July 9, 2021 2:45 p.m. Facebook Twitter Email A takeout container full of food from House of Dim Sum, one of the restaurants on the app Too Good To Go. A takeout container full of food from House of Dim Sum, one of the restaurants on the app Too Good To Go. Courtesy of Too Good To Go As I walk out of San Francisco grocery chain Luke's Local on a recent Tuesday evening, I feel an unexpected wave of guilt wash over me. In my hand is a heavy brown paper bag packed full of eight pieces of produce, a ham and goat cheese sandwich, a loaf of seeded country bread, a fancy looking almond pound cake, two chocolate sea salt cookies and a pack of pita bread. Somehow, I only paid $5.99 for this haul that will feed me in various ways for at least a week. The pound cake alone has a price sticker on it that says $13.99. On this day, the day I feel like I paid a small fee to rob a bank, I decided to get all my meals (or at least my food for a 24-hour period) through the new app Too Good To Go, an anti-food waste company that helps facilitate getting excess food from restaurants and grocery stores to the general public for just $4.99 or $5.99 per "surprise bag." When I opened the app that morning, I had plenty of San Francisco restaurants and grocery stores to choose from, including many that I'd describe as downright trendy, like Brandon Jew's Mamahuhu and Michael Mina's Indie Superette. I decided to choose a few I knew well, figuring that was my best bet to get a well-rounded day's meals based on what I knew the restaurant stocked. I figured I'd get dinner from House of Dim Sum, breakfast from Daily Driver, the fixing for a lunch from Luke's Local and a sweet treat and maybe a loaf of bread from La Boulangerie. I was very, very wrong. You see, each establishment can give a customer anything they want in a "surprise bag." Sometimes the app might describe what's likely to be inside (I saw this rarely), but more often, you just have to guess based on what they serve. But what I was wrong about wasn't necessarily the bag's contents (obviously I expected and was correct that Daily Driver would give me leftover bagels), it was the amount of food inside each bag. While costing the customer $4.99, each bag is supposed to have a value of at least $15 (or a $5.99 bag should have a value of $18) and each bag I picked up had at least that, and most times much, much more. My plan for roughly three meals plus a dessert in reality subsidized meals for myself and my husband all week long. My haul from La Boulangerie included a banana nut pound cake, a big chocolate chip cookie, a raspberry financier and a baguette for $4.99. Tessa McLean At La Boulangerie Noe Valley, my bag included a banana nut pound cake, a big chocolate chip cookie, a raspberry financier and a baguette for $4.99 -- probably the most on the dot to $15 I could get when adding in tax based on my calculations. Picking up my dinner at House of Dim Sum, I'm greeted with a giant to-go container full of egg rolls, shrimp dumplings, pot stickers and jian dui, so packed that I share with my husband and it's enough for both our dinners -- all for $5.99. I ate the sandwich from Luke's Local for lunch the next day and used the pita bread to devour some hummus I had in the fridge. And I still had breakfast for the rest of the week -- six bagels from Daily Driver that usually cost $3.50 per bagel. That's not to mention the bell peppers and onion and garlic I ended up using to supplement a taco dinner later in the week or the pieces of baguette I used to sop up pasta sauce during yet another dinner and the many desserts that came from the various cookies and that very delicious $13.99 pound cake. Luke's Local packed a grocery bag full of produce, a ham and goat cheese sandwich, a loaf of seeded country bread, an almond pound cake, two chocolate sea salt cookies and a pack of pita bread -- all for $5.99. Tessa McLean Food waste is a big problem nationwide, but especially so in the United States. As much as 40% of our food gets thrown away in this country, according to the Department of Agriculture. A 2014 study by the Food Waste Reduction Alliance found that 84.3% of unused food in American restaurants ends up being disposed of, and only 1.4% is donated. Too Good To Go was born in Denmark and quickly spread to France, the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands in 2016. Co-founder Lucie Basch said they knew the key to getting restaurants to participate would be to make the process as simple as possible, making the app easy to use and not requiring any upfront commitments. There's no quota a restaurant has to meet, so they can add food whenever they want and as often as they want. The company takes a flat fee of $1.79 per purchase -- which is pretty high when you convert it to a percentage (about 35% for a $4.99 bag) but pretty low when you consider that most if not all of the food would have generated the restaurant or store zero revenue at all. Top Picks In Shopping * Shopping I drank this CBD-infused coffee for a week. Here's what I... * Shopping 12 houseplants that can thrive in low-light conditions * Shopping Bay Area summer concerts and festivals calendar * Shopping Here's how to get 20% off Yeti products For Beacon Coffee & Pantry owner Alexis Liu, it's a "win-win" for her small business in North Beach. Liu said they almost always have some food items leftover at the end of the day, even if it's just one bag's worth of pastries, and she's happy she doesn't have to worry about it going to waste anymore. She also said she believes it's introducing them to new customers who may not have visited the shop before but are now familiar with them and their products. "Even if it's just one bag we sell and the actual amount we get from [the app] is nominal, it's better than nothing and it's better than anything going in a landfill," Liu said. Basch said that's a big value proposition for restaurants, and while it's not something I initially thought of, I completely agree. I wouldn't have likely ever bought the seeded loaf from Luke's or that expensive pound cake, but now, I might think twice about them if I'm ever shopping again in the store. Right now, Too Good To Go is available in New York, Boston, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Portland and Seattle, in addition to the Bay Area, and the goal is to keep adding more restaurants across the Bay Area to the platform. The company hopes to launch in LA by the end of the year. The company estimates it has saved more than 72 million meals across 15 countries since its launch, which adds up to 250 million pounds of food. Lucie Basch, one of Too Good To Go's founders, Courtesy of Too Good To Go Basch said she hopes restaurants and grocery stores can learn from participating in the app as well. If a restaurant sees, for example, that they always seem to have 10 leftover baguettes at the end of the day, maybe they could start baking eight less each day and see if that helps their food costs. I promise this article isn't sponsored by Too Good To Go, but I was genuinely shocked and pleased by how much food each "surprise bag" contained and the quality of it. For consumers, there just don't seem to be many cons. Sure I got a pear that was way too past its prime to eat, but the bag of groceries was already vastly underpriced, so I didn't feel bad composting a pear that would have ended up being composted at the store. Picking up the items in a narrow time limit can be burdensome (the store sets whatever timing it wants -- you may have as little as a 15-minute window and up to several hours), but if you're in a neighborhood with a lot of participating restaurants and you have a flexible schedule, it's really not that hard. The biggest barrier for many will likely be abiding by dietary restrictions. If you have an extreme allergy, Basch admits the app probably isn't for you, as they can never guarantee what's in any given bag. They do have a filter for vegetarian items, but when I clicked it, most of the restaurants disappeared from my app. But, looking back at my haul, only one out of four places included items with meat. If you're on a budget, passionate about reducing food waste and not a picky eater, this app might be exactly the win-win-win it dubs itself as. My dinner from House of Dim Sum was full of egg rolls, shrimp dumplings, pot stickers and jian dui -- all for $5.99. Tessa McLean Top Picks In Shopping * Shopping I drank this CBD-infused coffee for a week. Here's what I... * Shopping 12 houseplants that can thrive in low-light conditions * Shopping Bay Area summer concerts and festivals calendar * Shopping Here's how to get 20% off Yeti products Written By Tessa McLean Reach Tessa on Tessa is a Local Editor for SFGATE. Before joining the team in 2019, she specialized in food, drink and lifestyle content for numerous publications including Liquor.com, The Bold Italic, 7x7 and more. 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