In line with Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s CSR strategy “Better Places 2030”, UR Link, its open innovation platform, has decided to partner with Too Good To Go, a start-up fighting food wastage, to test the solution within Euralille, its shopping centre in Lille.

What is Too Good To Go?

10 million tons of food are thrown away each year in France. Faced with this reality, the mobile app Too Good To Go intends to solve this problem by allowing each one of us to act against food waste on a daily basis. Created in 2016, Too Good To Go acts as a platform, putting in contact citizens with restaurants, hotels and food sellers. Instead of having unsold food at the end of the day, professionals can sell it at a discount on the app, leading to a win-win solution: they can earn money for food that they would otherwise have wasted, and consumers can save more than half the price of the regular meal. Overall, food waste is effectively reduced every day thanks to a committed community.

Too Good To Go’s popularity has exploded and the start-up experiences a fast-paced development: it is now available in eight countries and has more than 8,000 merchant partners. In France, 3 500 partners benefit from the service all over the territory. In total, Too Good to Go has been downloaded million times and managed to save more than three million meals in two years in the eight countries where it operates.

The partnership

UR Link, the open innovation platform of Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield supports this development and has just signed a partnership with the app to reduce food waste within its centres. The team has studied in depth Too Good To Go solution and sees it as an answer to address the issue of waste management and strengthens its circular economy’s partnerships.

Initially, the partnership consists in a 4-month Proof of Concept in Euralille and has onboarded five food merchants operating within the centre. Visitors of the centre hence have the opportunity to order food baskets of all these places at a discount, directly from the app. Communication has also been set up to raise awareness in the app in the shopping centres. So far, the first results are encouraging with 280 meals saved in 7 days, which is equivalent to 140 kg of food and 560 kg of CO2.

This first POC in Euralille aims at experimenting the solution provided by Too Good To Go within the Group, to test all its operational aspects and how well it is adopted by professionals and visitors. In the long run, if the test phase confirms to be successful, the solution will be deployed to other centres of the Group, making it accessible to around 1.2 billion visitors each year and contributing to improving waste management within the Group.

This partnership is an answer to the issue of food waste and more generally waste management within the Group, in line with the CSR objectives of the Group defined in its “Better Places 2030” ambition. The solution will provide a convenient food waste management’s solution for all the restaurants of the centre, which will reduce the volume of waste. It also reinforces customer experience, by offering at a discount food from the best restaurants and grocery shops.