Too Good to Go (TGTG) is a food waste app that aims to connect consumers to stores and restaurants with surplus food that would otherwise be sent to landfills. Launched in Denmark in 2015, TGTG has expanded to 19 countries, amassing over 100 million users worldwide. A key ingenuity of TGTG is that it allows stores to sell ``surprise bags" composed of leftover food. Consumers pre-order surprise bags in advance and pick up their orders at a specified time window, often at the end of the business day. Importantly, at the time of ordering, consumers do not know exactly the amount of food inside each bag and may be ``surprised" by the bag content. Since TGTG enables clearance sales with a surprise element, we refer to it as surprise clearance. Other food waste apps, such as Flashfood (in North America) and Karma (in Europe), also enable stores to sell surplus food at a discounted price, but unlike TGTG, they take a more classical approach to clearance and put emphasis on ``transparency."

The paper models surprise clearance and compares it with no clearance and transparent clearance. Surprise clearance is shown to achieve the highest store profit and induce the most store production among the three selling schemes. While both clearance schemes have the ability to eliminate store waste, they both exacerbate the problem of consumer waste compared to no clearance. In particular, despite zero store waste, surprise clearance generates the most consumer waste among the three schemes. If clearance sales target a consumer segment with a sufficiently low valuation of consumption, both clearance schemes reduce total food waste, and surprise clearance represents a win-win-win solution that maximizes store profit and social welfare, and minimizes total waste among the three schemes. Nevertheless, there are circumstances under which both clearance schemes fail to reduce total waste, and surprise clearance may end up with the most total waste among the three schemes. Thus, while this novel scheme of surprise clearance can be a promising “win-win-win” solution, it may also fail (miserably) in the mission to reduce food waste, despite its deceiving success in eliminating store waste.