Same bags, different terms

If your surplus bags sell out shortly after you list them, day after day, that tells you something specific. Demand for what you make exceeds the amount of it you have left over.That is a better position than most shops are in, and it is worth thinking about what it means. It means the constraint is not whether people want your food at a discount. They plainly do. The constraint is how much surplus you actually have, and what you are charged to move it.Only one of those two is something you can change this month.

Selling out every day is information

Foody Bag works the way you already work. You list the number of bags you expect to have spare, set the collection window and the price, and a customer buys through the app before coming in.The collection step will look familiar too, and you can pick which version suits your counter. The customer taps when they arrive and swipes to collect, or shows a QR code instead. Swipe to collect is what most stores use now, and QR remains there for the ones who prefer it.Too Good To Go's own guidance for customers describes the same shape: swipe in the app at pickup, staff hand the bag over. Either way it runs on a phone. There is no extra hardware to buy, no terminal to operate and nothing for anyone to key in.So there is no new workflow to teach staff, no different kind of bag to assemble, and no change to how the food leaves the shop. If your team can already handle a surprise-bag pickup at closing, they can handle this one.That matters mainly because it lowers the cost of finding out. Trying a second platform is a scheduling decision rather than an operational project.

The model is the same, so there is nothing to relearn

Foody Bag takes 15 per cent. On top of that sits the card transaction fee, which is 1.7 per cent plus 30 cents on a domestic credit card. There is no subscription, no monthly cost and no lock-in period.On a $9.99 bag that works out at about $1.50 in commission and about 47 cents in card fees, leaving roughly $8.02 with the store. Those are round numbers on one bag price, so run them against your own price and your own volume rather than taking our example for it.That example is also the dearer end of it. When a customer pays with credit earned through referrals, the transaction fee is lower and can be nothing at all, so some bags land closer to the full price in the store's account.We are not going to tell you what another platform charges you, because their commercial terms are not published and we are not in a position to state them accurately. You are, though. The number is on your own statements.So the comparison worth making is the one you can do yourself: take a week of bags at the price you actually charge, apply both rates, and look at the difference. If it is small, this is not worth your attention. If it is not small, it compounds every single day you trade.

What we charge, and how to check it against what you pay now

The obvious objection to any of this is risk. You have a channel that works, and a shop that sells out has more to lose by disrupting that than by leaving things alone.So do not disrupt it. If you are selling out, you have room to test: put part of your usual allocation on Foody Bag, keep the rest where it is, and compare over a few weeks. Same food, same closing time, same bags. You will find out what happens without betting the channel on it.One thing not to do is make extra bags to cover both. The moment you bake to fill listings, you are producing stock to sell at clearance prices, which is a different and worse business than selling what was genuinely left over.

You do not have to switch to find out

It would be easy to tell you that the customers who follow your shop on another app will follow it here. We do not know that, and neither does anyone else selling you a platform.What is reasonable to expect is that some will and some will not. People form habits around the app on their phone as much as the shop on their street, and a customer who has notifications, a saved card and a routine somewhere else does not move for nothing.That is exactly why the sensible version of this is a split test rather than a switch. Run both, watch what actually happens with your own bags in your own suburb, and let the answer come from your numbers instead of from our marketing.

What we cannot promise

Foody Bag is Australian owned and most of the network is independents rather than chains, which is who the platform is built around. If you are a single-site bakery or cafe, you are the ordinary case here, not the exception.If you want to try it, you can r<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://business.foodybag.com.au/register">egister your store </a>and list your first bags without committing to anything.And if you try it and your customers do not follow, you will have learned that for the cost of a few bags you were going to have spare anyway.

Where this leaves an independent store

A test worth running if your surplus bags disappear every day

Already Selling Out? Read This Before You Renew

Surplus, not production

Every retailer asked to list surplus bags raises the same thing, and it deserves a straight answer rather than reassurance. If people can buy a bag of your food for a third of the price at five o'clock, why would they keep paying full price at eleven?It is a reasonable worry. Discounting can train customers to wait, and a shop that becomes known for cheap end-of-day stock can find that reputation arriving before its reputation for quality does.The research on this is more interesting than either side of the argument usually admits. The risk is real, but it is not where most people expect it to be.

The objection, stated fairly

Start with who actually turns up.<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/analysis-and-features/food-waste-apps-say-sharing-is-caring-but-do-they-work/701359.article"> Reporting in The Groce</a>r on UK surplus and reduced-price platforms found that around half of shoppers coming in for reduced items were new to the store, and that about two thirds bought full-priced items alongside the discounted ones.That is the opposite of cannibalisation. It describes a discount that brings in people who were not walking past your window before, and who then buy something at full price while they are inside.These are platform and supplier figures rather than independent audits, so treat the exact percentages with some caution. The direction is consistent though, and it matches what most retailers report once they have run bags for a few months: the bag buyer at closing time is usually a different person from the customer who came in at morning tea.

The people buying surplus are mostly not your regulars

The strongest study on this comes from Luyi Yang at UC Berkeley and Man Yu at HKUST,<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2023.03001"> published in Management Science in</a> 2025. They modelled surprise-bag clearance against traditional markdowns and against no clearance at all.Surprise clearance came out best for store profit. It also induced the most production of the three, and that is the finding worth sitting with<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/research-shows-the-unintended-consequences-of-food-waste-apps/">. Their conclusio</a>n was that clearance sales can end up generating more waste than having no clearance at all, because the shop quietly starts baking for the bags.That is the trap, and it has nothing to do with undercutting your counter. It is that a reliable outlet for leftovers stops being an outlet for leftovers and becomes a second production line, at a third of the price, with all the same input costs.

The real risk is the oven, not the counter

The same study found the model is not equally suited to every shop. Surprise clearance worked well for high-margin food, the sort sold by premium bakeries and restaurants, where a discounted bag still carries a sensible contribution.It was most likely to backfire on narrow-margin products, where the discount does not leave much behind and the incentive to produce more is the main effect. A grocer selling staples is in a different position from a patisserie selling pastries, and should be more cautious.They also found that bags made of similar items generate less waste than bags of mixed assortments, because a customer who wanted bread and got bread throws less of it away.

Margin decides whether this works for you

All of which points at a short set of controls rather than a decision to be for or against discounting.<ul><li>Never bake to fill bags. The moment production rises to meet bag demand, the economics invert and you are selling new stock at clearance prices.</li><li>Set the number from what was actually left over last week, not from what you could sell if you made more.</li><li>Keep collection at the end of trade. A window that opens mid-afternoon competes with your own counter. One that opens as you are closing cannot.</li><li>Vary what goes in, and vary how many you list. Predictability is what teaches a regular to wait.</li><li>Keep bags reasonably homogeneous where you can. It wastes less at the other end and it sets expectations you can meet.</li></ul>

Five things that keep a bag genuinely surplus

Selling surplus does not undercut your counter. Producing surplus does.The distinction matters because the second one is easy to slide into without noticing, and it arrives disguised as success: bags selling out, a new revenue line, a reason to make a few more tomorrow.Foody Bag is built for the first case. A store lists what it expects to have spare, sets the collection window and the price, and someone nearby collects before close. If a shop finds itself making extra to meet demand on the platform, that is worth catching early, because at that point the food is not surplus and the arithmetic stops working in the shop's favour.

What it comes down to

What the research says about discounting, and the mistake that actually costs money

Selling Surplus Without Undercutting Your Counter

Small change, big impact

When someone buys a Foody Bag, they can round their purchase up to the nearest dollar. The extra cents go to a good cause. That is the whole mechanic, and it is deliberately small.Nobody is asked to make a decision about how much to give, or to fill in a form, or to remember to do something later. The choice is a single tap at checkout, and the amount is whatever it takes to reach the next whole dollar. Some people round up by more.On its own that is a few cents. The point is that it happens thousands of times.

Rounding up, one bag at a time

This is the part that makes the feature different from most round-up schemes, where a company nominates one national charity and every customer contributes to the same pot.On Foody Bag the cause is chosen by the store. The bakery, cafe or grocer decides who their customers' cents go to, which usually means a cause with some connection to where the shop actually is or what the people running it care about.So the money stays close to the counter it came from, and a customer rounding up at one shop may be supporting something quite different from a customer rounding up down the road.

The store partner picks the cause

Two causes have now each passed $1,000, raised entirely in rounded-up cents across many partner stores.The first was <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.mtalk.com.au/">Mens Talk AU</a>, a Perth not-for-profit working on men's mental health, including suicide prevention. The cheque was presented in person at Scarborough Beach.The second was <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.ozharvest.org/">OzHarvest</a>, one of Australia's leading food rescue organisations, whose vans collect surplus food from businesses and deliver it free to charities that feed people. Food rescuers supporting food rescuers, which is a pleasing way for the money to travel.A third cause is close to the same milestone.

What it has added up to so far

Giving usually fails at the point of friction. A donation that requires a separate decision, a separate payment and a separate moment of remembering is a donation that mostly does not happen, however willing the person is.A round-up removes all three. The decision is already in front of you, the payment is already happening, and the moment is now. What it gives up is size: nobody is donating meaningfully in a single tap.That trade only works at volume, which is why a digital donation tin takes a while to fill and then arrives as a real cheque. A thousand dollars in loose cents is thousands of separate small acts, none of which felt like much at the time.

Why small and automatic beats big and occasional

Small Change, Big Impact moves money. There is a second programme that moves food instead.Community Share lets a store give surplus food directly to a local cause at no charge, with the cause collecting at a time the retailer sets. No bag is sold and no money changes hands. It suits the food that is better going straight to a group who can use it that evening.Between them the two cover the two things a food business actually has to give: what it did not sell, and the goodwill of the people buying from it.

The other way stores give: Community Share

Charities, not-for-profits, schools and community groups can<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.foodybag.com.au/beneficiaries"> register to receive either kind of suppor</a>t. The form asks for the organisation's details, an ABN, a contact, and which of the two programmes suits you.Being listed does not by itself bring in money. A store partner still has to choose you, which in practice means the causes that do best are the ones with a real connection to a neighbourhood where Foody Bag stores operate.If this piece has touched on something difficult and you would like to talk to someone, Lifeline is available on 13 11 14, at any hour.

If you run a good cause

Rounded-up cents, a cause chosen by your local shop, and two cheques so far

How Small Change, Big Impact Actually Works

The cost of the remainder

<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://phys.org/news/2024-10-menus-food-cafes-thousands.html">Research carried out at RMIT University f</a>or End Food Waste Australia found that up to 60 per cent of an average cafe's bin is food, and a good deal of it is edible, quality food rather than scraps and peelings.The two biggest contributors were preparation and spoilage. Not customers leaving food on plates, which is where most people assume the problem sits, but food that never made it out of the kitchen in the first place.That distinction matters, because prep and spoilage waste is the kind a venue actually controls.

Most of what goes in the bin is food

<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://endfoodwaste.com.au/end-food-waste-australia-unveils-action-plans-to-help-slash-food-waste-and-costs-for-cafes-and-caterers/">End Food Waste Australia</a> puts it in a unit any cafe owner can picture: an average cafe generates food waste equivalent to 70,000 cups of coffee per employee, every year.Across the sector, hospitality wastes the equivalent of 4.6 million meals a day. That is more than 1.2 million tonnes a year, or about 16 per cent of all the food Australia wastes.The national figure is easy to read past. The per-employee one is harder to ignore, because it is the size of a problem sitting inside one ordinary business.

The number that makes it concrete

Wasted food is not a cost like rent or wages. It is stock that was bought, stored, prepared and then thrown out, so it comes straight off the gross margin without producing anything.The arithmetic is unforgiving on a low-margin business. If a venue runs at a five per cent net margin, then every $100 of food thrown away needs $2,000 of additional sales just to get back to where it started. At three per cent it takes more than $3,300.Those percentages are illustrative rather than a claim about any particular cafe. The point holds at whatever the real number is: the thinner the margin, the more sales it takes to cover a dollar of waste, and hospitality margins are not generous.

Why thin margins turn waste into a serious number

The RMIT work tested practical changes rather than exhortations to try harder. The recommendations that came out of it were specific:<ul><li>Shorten the menu. Fewer dishes means fewer ingredients held in small quantities, which is where spoilage concentrates.</li><li>Reconsider the pie warmer. Display equipment that holds cooked food all day is a reliable source of end-of-day waste.</li><li>Normalise doggy bags, so food that left the kitchen has somewhere to go other than the bin.</li><li>Train staff specifically on waste, rather than assuming it is obvious.</li><li>Buy imperfect produce direct from growers, which costs less and uses food that would otherwise be rejected on looks.</li></ul>The <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://endfoodwaste.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/CAFE-LAB-REPORT-2024-Bookmarked.pdf">full Cafe Sector Action Plan repor</a>t sets out the method and the findings in detail, and it is worth a read if you want the reasoning rather than the summary.

What the research suggests actually works

Every item on that list is about producing less waste in the first place, which is the right order to work in. Nothing recovers the value of food as well as not overproducing it.But no amount of planning gets a venue to zero. Demand is not knowable in advance, and a cafe that consistently runs out by mid afternoon has traded one problem for another. There will be a remainder most days, and the question is what happens to it.Selling it is the option that recovers actual money. Staff take and donation both have their place, and neither returns anything to the till. A late discount clears stock but can pull customers away from full price if it becomes a predictable daily event.

Prevention first, then the remainder

Foody Bag exists for that remainder. A venue lists however many bags it expects to have spare, sets the collection window and the price, and someone nearby buys one through the app and picks it up before close.The value is not only the money recovered on the bag, though that is real. It is that the food leaves as a sale rather than as waste, and it leaves with a customer who has now been inside the shop. Some of them come back at full price.None of that replaces cutting waste at the source. Treat it as what it is: the last step, after the menu has been tightened and the prep has been sharpened, for the food that was always going to be left over anyway.

Where a surplus platform fits

The arithmetic of waste on a thin margin, and what to do about it

What Unsold Stock Actually Costs a Cafe

Two dates, two meanings

Most kitchens hold both kinds at once. A tub of yoghurt carries one. A tin of chickpeas carries the other. They sit in the same spot on the label, they are printed in the same small type, and they mean genuinely different things.One is about safety. The other is about quality. Getting them the wrong way round is how good food ends up in the bin, and occasionally how risky food ends up on a plate.The rules come from <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumer/labelling/dates">Food Standards Australia New Zealand</a>, and they are more clear cut than most people expect.

Two dates that do completely different jobs

A best-before date marks the point after which food may start to lose quality. It might be less crisp, less bright, a little stale. It does not mark the point at which the food becomes unsafe.Food carrying a best-before date can legally be sold after that date, provided it is still fit for human consumption. That is not a loophole or a grey area. It is the rule as written, and it is why you sometimes see marked-down tins and packets sitting past their date quite legitimately.<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.foodbank.org.au/use-by-and-best-before-dates/">Foodbank Australia</a> makes the same point for the home: best-before food remains legal to sell and safe to eat until it is genuinely no longer fit, which for a well stored packet can be a long time.There is a related rule worth knowing. Food with a shelf life of two years or more does not need a date mark at all. If a product carries no date, that is not an oversight.

Best before is a quality date, and the law says so plainly

A use-by date is a safety deadline. Food should not be eaten after it, and it cannot legally be sold after it, because it may pose a health or safety risk.These dates go on the things that spoil in ways you cannot always see or smell: meat, dairy, cooked meals and other highly perishable foods. The absence of an obvious problem is not evidence that the food is fine.So the practical rule is short. Read which of the two phrases is actually printed. If it says use by, the date is the end of the matter. If it says best before, the date is advice about quality.

Use by is the one to take seriously

Bread is the one food allowed a different kind of date entirely. If a loaf has a shelf life of under seven days, it can be labelled with a baked-on or a baked-for date instead of a best-before.The two are defined precisely. A baked-on date is the day the bread was baked. A baked-for date is the same day if the bread came out of the oven before midday, or the following day if it came out after.This matters because those dates are not deadlines at all. A loaf marked with yesterday's baked-on date has not passed anything. It is a record of when it was made, which is a different kind of statement from a use-by date, even though it occupies the same place on the packaging.

Bread gets its own rule

This is not a niche misunderstanding. The<a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/news/we-hear-you-lets-clear-confusion-around-food-date-labels"> 2023 Consumer Insights Tracker</a> found that up to a third of Australian and New Zealand consumers are unclear about what date marks mean.The regulator's own concern points at the safety side of that confusion, because someone who treats a use-by date as a suggestion can make themselves ill. The waste side is the mirror image of the same problem. Someone who treats a best-before date as a deadline throws out food that was never unsafe, and does it on a schedule, week after week.Both errors come from the same place, which is not reading which of the two phrases is on the label.

The confusion is widespread, and it runs both ways

A shop selling surplus at the end of the day is bound by exactly the same law as it was at nine that morning. Nothing past its use-by date can be sold, by anyone, at any price. A discount does not change that, and neither does the fact that the food would otherwise be thrown out.This is worth saying because surplus and expired are easy to confuse, and they are not the same thing. Surplus food is food that did not sell in time, not food that has passed a date. The clock that matters is the shop's closing time, not the label.Foody Bag works within that ordinary rule. A shop lists what it expects to have spare, someone buys a bag through the app and collects it during a set window, usually for a third to a half of what the same food cost earlier that day. The saving comes from the timing, not from the age of the food.If you take one habit from all of this, make it the smallest one. Before deciding whether something is finished, read which of the two phrases is printed next to the date.

What this means for a bag of surplus food

What the two dates on an Australian food label actually mean

Best Before Doesn't Mean Bin It

At closing time

A bakery that sells out at two in the afternoon has lost sales it could have made. A bakery with a full display case at closing has lost money it already spent. There is no production run that lands exactly right, because nobody knows in the morning how many people will walk past at four.So bakers deliberately overbake. An empty shelf sends a regular customer somewhere else tomorrow, and that costs more than the tray of pastries does. The surplus at closing time is not a mistake. It is the predictable cost of keeping the shelves worth looking at.The scale of it is easy to underestimate. More than 319,400 tonnes of food is wasted every year across the Australian bread and bakery value chain, according to the <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://endfoodwaste.com.au/sector-action-plans/">Bread and Bakery Sector Action Plan</a> published by End Food Waste Australia. They put that at roughly the weight of 456 million loaves.Across hospitality more broadly, <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.rca.asn.au/homepage-news-gallery/food-waste-in-hospitality">Restaurant &amp; Catering Australia</a> puts the sector at about 16 per cent of Australia's total food waste, or close to 1.2 million tonnes a year.

The problem with baking exactly enough

The first option is the oldest one. Staff take food home. It is simple, it costs nothing to administer, and it runs out of room quickly. A team of four can absorb a few loaves and some pastries. They cannot absorb a full case, and they cannot do it every night of the week.The second is the late markdown. Half price after four, or whatever the shop decides. This works, and it has a catch that anyone who has run a counter will recognise. Do it at the same time every day and some regulars simply stop buying at full price. The discount stops clearing surplus and starts creating it.Both options handle small volumes well. Neither one scales to a bad Tuesday.

Staff take and the late markdown

Food rescue is the option people think of first, and in Perth it operates at real scale. <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.ozharvest.org/your-local-ozharvest/perth/">OzHarvest's Perth team</a> runs eight vans, collecting more than 135,000 kilograms of surplus food a month and delivering around 80,000 meals a week.There is a widespread belief among small food businesses that giving food away creates legal exposure if someone later gets sick. In Western Australia that belief is mistaken. The <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://www.legislation.wa.gov.au/legislation/statutes.nsf/main_mrtitle_1031_homepage.html">Volunteers and Food and Other Donors (Protection from Liability) Act 2002</a> protects people who donate food in good faith for a charitable purpose, where the food was safe when it left them and they passed on whatever the charity needed to know to keep it that way.What actually limits donation is logistics, not liability. Rescue runs on scheduled routes, refrigerated vans and predictable volume. A single suburban cafe with six croissants and two sourdough loaves at closing does not fit a van route, and no amount of goodwill makes it fit. Donation moves large, reliable surplus very well. It was never built for the small daily tail.

Donation, and the law most people get wrong

Then there is the bin. Food organics and garden organics collection now reaches 22 local governments across the Perth, Peel and South West regions, with around nine more expected to join by June 2026, as reported by <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://wastemanagementreview.com.au/western-australian-councils-join-fogo/">Waste Management Review</a>. Unlike New South Wales, Western Australia's rollout is funded and voluntary rather than legislated.FOGO is a genuine improvement on landfill. Food buried in landfill breaks down without oxygen and produces methane. Sent to composting instead, it comes back as something useful. If a pastry has to be thrown out, the FOGO bin is where it should go.It is worth being clear about what that fixes, though. By the time a croissant reaches the organics bin, the flour, the butter, the water, the electricity and the hour of someone's morning are all already spent. Composting recovers none of that. FOGO deals with waste well. It does not stop food being wasted.

The FOGO bin is a better bin, not a rescue

The fifth option is to sell it, late and cheap, to somebody close enough to collect it before the shop closes. This is the gap surplus marketplaces exist to fill, and it is the one that suits the small daily tail that donation cannot take and markdowns handle badly.Foody Bag works this way in Perth. A shop lists however many bags it expects to have spare, sets the pickup window and the price, usually a third to a half of what the food would have cost earlier that day. Someone buys a bag through the app, gets a QR code, and collects it at the counter during that window.The contents are not itemised, because the shop does not know at ten in the morning what will be left at five. That surprise is not a gimmick. It is the only way to sell food that has not been decided on yet.

Sold cheaply, to someone standing nearby

A few practical things follow from all of this.<ul><li>Surplus appears on a schedule. Bakeries have it near closing, because that is when the day's production has finished competing with itself.</li><li>A bag is made of whatever did not sell, so flexibility is the whole skill. Turn up wanting a specific pastry and you will be disappointed.</li><li>Collection windows are short by design. The shop is trying to close.</li></ul>The thing most worth knowing is the least obvious. Food sold at the end of the day is the same food that was on the shelf at nine that morning, at the same shop, made by the same people. Nothing about it has changed except the clock, and the price.

What this means if you are the one buying

Five things a bakery can do at closing time

What Happens to Unsold Bakery Food at the End of the Day

Every day, food retailers across Australia close up shop with great food left unsold. Perfectly fresh focaccias, flaky pastries, sushi rolls, sandwiches, and more — all at risk of going to waste simply because the clock ran out.That’s why we built Foody Bag — the Australian app that helps businesses sell their surplus food at the end of the day, attract new local customers, and boost their bottom line.

🍞 How Local Food Retailers Are Turning Unsold Stock into Profit — and Purpose

🎯 Foody Bag connects your store to nearby customers who want to grab a great-value bag of food - quickly, easily, and at a price you set.<ul><li>You choose how many Foody Bags to make available each day</li><li>You decide the pickup time and minimum value</li><li>You get paid directly into your bank account every Monday</li></ul>Customers don’t expect itemised contents — it’s a lucky dip bag, made up of food that would otherwise go unsold. It’s a win-win: less waste for you, great value for them.

A Simple Way to Boost Sales and Cut Waste

As your store becomes more popular on Foody Bag, you gain more flexibility in how you price your bags:<ul><li>After selling 50 bags, you’ve proven that your lucky dip bags are popular — you may choose to reduce the discount you offer.</li><li>After 100 bags, your reputation is well established — you can tweak your pricing again if you like, based on customer demand.</li></ul>It’s not an automatic price change — it’s your opportunity to optimise your offer as your store builds trust on the platform.

💸 Build Your Reputation, Then Adjust Your Discount

Unlike other platforms, Foody Bag only charges a small commission — just 15% plus card transaction fees. No subscriptions. No lock-ins. No monthly costs.💡 Example: Sell just 5 Foody Bags a day at $9.99 each, and over a year you could reclaim more than $18,000 from food that might’ve otherwise gone to waste.

📈 Real Revenue with Low Fees

Foody Bag is proudly Australian-owned and operated.<ul><li>Your money stays in Australia</li><li>We promote local stores, not global chains</li><li>We reinvest into local outreach, marketing, and growth</li><li>No offshore HQs — just community-driven food rescue</li></ul>

🇦🇺 Built in Australia, for Australians

With our “Small Change, Big Impact” feature, customers can round up their purchase — and the extra cents go to a charity of your choice.Whether it’s a school down the road, a food bank, or a local shelter — you’re in control of the cause.

❤️ Let Customers Round Up for Good

Foody Bag offers flexibility, lower fees, and community features you won’t find elsewhere. We’ve prepared a simple comparison chart that lays it all out clearly — including:<ul><li>Commission fees</li><li>Ownership (local vs global)</li><li>Marketing support</li><li>Donation options</li><li>Custom pricing</li><li>And more</li></ul>

🔍 Want to See How It Stacks Up?

Why Foody Bag is the right choice

How Food Retailers Turn Unsold Stock into Profit

How to be the next TGTG in your region

Over the years there have been many food surplus apps come and go. Either their business model wasn't right, their marketing failed or their software was mediocre. We looked back at all those shuttered apps that didn't quite hit the mark and the common issue among them all was poor software.Too Good To Go (TGTG) has excellent branding and worldwide market presence and it has the bank account to make software to match.Foody Bag is the only food surplus platform that is comparable and its backers have made a business out of software. Foody Bag's CEO, Stuart Kidd is the brains behind the software company, Apps People, a hugely successful mobile app development company in Australia.He has an enviable track record in startups including being the first person to list a mobile app development company (Applabs Ltd) on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX).Foody Bag is about to start its next journey - licence its software worldwide to operators outside of Australia (and including operators in Australia outside of where the platform already has a presence).How will this work?Selected operators will work closely with Foody Bag to launch the platform in their area exclusively, this could be a city, region or a country. The operator will run all marketing campaigns with Foody Bag's help. All software will be provided by Foody Bag. Any new features Foody Bag launches will be delivered worldwide. An operator will be like a franchisee and pay an upfront payment followed by a percentage of sales.<h2></h2>

A licence to sell surplus food

Food surplus software-as-a-service

Too Good To Go Alternatives

Too Good To Go (TGTG) is a well known surplus food platform brand in many parts of the world.They have large teams on many continents and those employees cover tech, marketing and sales. They have a presence in large cities and regional areas and now have significant influence due to partnerships with large food retailers across the globe.With large teams however, comes the necessity to charge substantially larger commissions to retailers.So we've put a list together of the top 6 alternatives across the globe and this is how we placed them from first to sixth.First place: Foody Bag Second place: Olio Third place: Flashfood Fourth place: Karma Fifth place: ResQ Sixth place: FoodHero<h2>🥇 Foody Bag</h2>In first place is Foody Bag, an Australian-born app very much like TGTG except it's very community-focused, tying itself in with local charities and organisations.The basics of the app work the same as TGTG, customers see stores with available bags of food and make a purchase. They go pickup the food at the set time and are either instructed to use the swipe function when at store or use display their QR code.The app allows customers to round-up their purchases with the extra cents (or dollars) going to charity. Some of the recipients are OzHarvest, BCNA and Mens Talk.Foody Bag also has an Ambassador program where it works with community members and it gives a percentage of recurring commission to the ambassador for bringing on the new store.The commission Foody Bag charges is much less than Too Good To Go (15% compared to about 30% that TGTG charges). There's also no annual fee.The platform also allows stores to either sell their bags on the platform or donate them to beneficiaries. They can do a mix of both.Although currently launched in Australia only, the for-purpose operation can be licensed to countries across the globe. Foody Bag is working on an open source piece of software which will allow any food platform (think uberEats or DoorDash) to tap into Foody Bag's bag feed to list and sell surplus food.<h2>🥈Olio</h2>Olio have been well-known in Europe with their platform enabling neighbours to share surplus food from home kitchens.They have recently started selling surplus food on their platform and are competing with TGTG in the UK.We'll update this when we hear what their first year successes have been but it's looking promising for this platform.<h2>🥉Flashfood</h2>Flashfood is a, free, sustainability-focused app that connects consumers with grocery retailers to purchase surplus food nearing its best-before date at discounts of up to 50% or more. Users browse deals on produce, meat, and dairy, pay in the app, and pick up items from a designated fridge in-store. <h2>Karma</h2>Karma is a Swedish-founded food rescue app (launched in 2016) that reduces food waste by connecting restaurants, cafes, and grocery stores with consumers to sell surplus food at a discount. It allows users to purchase quality food for half price or less, providing businesses with an extra revenue stream while lessening environmental impact. <h2>ResQ</h2>Unsold food items from restaurants, cafés, and grocery stores that are offered at discounted prices (often 50% or more) through the ResQ Club app to prevent waste. These items are safe to eat but are often leftovers from lunch, near their best-before date, or overproduced, allowing users to buy affordable meals while helping the environment. <h2>Foodhero</h2>Closing our list is sixth-placed, FoodHero, an app-based marketplace that connects consumers with grocery stores and restaurants to sell surplus food items nearing their expiry date, overstock, or "ugly" produce, at significant discounts (25% to 60% off). It aims to reduce food waste, allowing users to buy discounted food and pick it up in-store, while tracking their environmental impact.

Other platforms to sell surplus food

Alternatives to Too Good To Go (TGTG)

Channel 9 News Interview

Channel 9 made us their feature story

Radio 6PR Interview

Stuart chats about the Foody Bag app launch

Foody Bag Interview on Radio 6PR, Perth

Foody Bag is looking for the help of motivated and talented Foody Bag Waste Warrior (FBWW) who care about food waste and its impact on the environment.As a FBWW, what do I need to do?You shouldn't mind chatting with others about important causes like food waste. You would chat with local cafes, bakeries, restaurants and supermarkets and discuss the advantages of Foody Bag and the benefits of reducing food waste.What happens once I meet a food retailer and they are interested?At that point you can sign them up on our business <a rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://business.foodybag.com.au/register-confirmation">sign-up portal here</a> and help them create Foody Bags.Do I get paid or is this just for the love of reducing food waste?You can make commission on Foody Bag sales that have been derived from businesses that you directly setup on the Foody Bag platform. It's not a huge amount that is made on selling a Foody Bag but it is a passive income and once you sign-up a new business there's probably not much you need to do other than dropping in to say hi from time to time. Once you setup more businesses, especially those popular stores, you may notice a good amount of passive income revenue.Okay, I'm very interested, now what?Go to the mobile app and send us a message from the Contact Us screen (found in the Settings screen).

Caring about food waste.

Earn and help save the planet

Become a Foody Bag BDM Partner

Every good idea needs to be validated

It was 2019, a rainy August afternoon in Perth, when one of my colleagues at Apps People mentioned a concept he'd used in Europe, a platform selling end of day food stock. It sounded like something that was needed in Australia, so much food was going to waste.These were pre-pandemic times and like any entrepreneur, I knew it was important to validate the idea locally, so I wanted to organise a catch-up with a bakery industry professional.I reached out to Michael Forde, the then co-owner and co-founder of the very popular Mary Street Bakery. Through a telephone conversation it quickly became apparent that there was a lot of food waste happening at stores. And through more validation I also discovered that many bakeries didn't even want to talk about it. It was although it was swept under the carpet.Fortunately Michael was very upfront about it and that led me going with my instinct and believing it was an app worth building.In December 2019 I launched an incubator program for neurodiverse individuals interested in having their own startup. The incubator, named ProFound Incubator received matched funding from JTSI (Department of Jobs, Training, Science and Innovation) and I was able to bring 10 talented individuals through the program and many were able to secure jobs after completion. During the program we used the Foody Bag concept to involve some of the participants who didn't have their own startup ideas.One of the talents took a part-time role with Apps People to help test the Foody Bag app before launch.At the end of June 2021 we launched Foody Bag to the public and it very soon became a well-known app in the community, helping to fight food waste. Foody Bag has since received great publicity from ABC Radio Perth, ABC, Channel 9 News, 6PR, Triple M, PerthNow and The West Australian newspaper.So from a simple idea to a mobile app that took 6 solid months to build before launch, we are truly grateful. The public has come together to help ensure it has a permanent part in the community.

A simple conversation

How It Got Started

Foody Bag History

The best planet-saving feature ever, ever!

Since our launch we’ve saved over 20,000 Foody Bags from reaching landfill. We’ve been hugely successful in helping to reduce retailer food waste thanks to you, even if only in small town Perth, Western Australia.But how about consumer waste that you have at home, what can we all do to minimise that? Did you know that 1 out of every three shopping bags full of groceries goes to waste.Now we are launching a feature to allow you to pick-up food for absolutely free of charge from people in your neighbourhood. This feature can be used by anyone, no location restrictions, whether you live in Perth or Paraburdoo, Tokyo or Treviso.Why is this even a feature?We are all guilty of food waste at the consumer level and now Foody Bag allows people to post food items that they’d like to donate, right from their home. Saving food helps our environment and it may also help someone who hasn't always got the funds to pay for food.It only takes a couple of minutes to list good to eat food on the app.Could one of these be your reason?<ul><li>You’re going away on holidays and there’s food that will expire if you leave it in the fridge or pantry.</li><li>You’ve had a bumper crop on the lemon tree and wish to make someone’s day by giving it to them.</li><li>Like too many others, you’ve bought too much food… again.</li><li>You cook a dish and donate it to someone in the community just because you like to share.</li><li>You bought multiple of the same item from the supermarket, only to get home and open one and realise you actually don't like it.</li><li>You checked the expiry of some food in the fridge and the date is fast approaching so you'd like to give it away before you have to throw it away.</li></ul>After you post your item, it’s reviewed by a real person and then is visible by anyone. Yes, we like to review everything before it goes live to ensure that it's only good food getting donated.Foody Bag members can then contact each other via the app and arrange a time for pick-up. The exact address is only given to the member once agreed. Prior to then the members will only see an approximate location.To encourage courteous behaviour and punctuality, both parties rate each other after pick-up.So what are you waiting for? Check your fridge or pantry and get donating and make someone smile today.

Are you ready for it?

Donate or Pick-up Unwanted Food

Foody Bag's Blezz Feature

Groupon and Scoopon were all about capitalism

Over 11 years ago, Groupon had their Australian launch, a whole 10 months after Scoopon already went out with their first deal.The deals on offer were broad and could be anything from a breakfast at your local cafe to a fine dining experience in a revolving restaurant (that one is still on Groupon, in fact!). The deals weren't just food-based, you could find discounts for experiences too, like cheap tickets to the cinema or other city attractionsIt was certainly a win for Groupon and Scoopon but the restaurants, cafes and hotels themselves - they didn't fare so well. For them, they often had to give up their peak-time seats or beds for cut-price deals.This year Foody Bag is planning to help get people into restaurants to pick up end of day food. In some cases the restaurant may be happy for customers to be seated and others may prefer food to be taken away. Unlike Groupon and Scoopon, food retailers will be selling food that would otherwise go to waste and it'll happen during non-peak hours.So for restaurants and food courts this will be a huge win, they'll be able to make money where there would normally be losses.Stay tuned for this new release as we're coming out of winter.

Our Blog