The Maze: Too Good To Go, the app that connects shoppers with retailers’ surplus stock, is expanding beyond food. Its 15 October announcement covers five everyday-product categories. Partnerships are growing across Europe, alongside existing flower offers in North America. What shoppers can actually buy depends on their market and store.
Source: Too Good To Go. Company launch illustration showing a bag of personal-care and beauty products.
The Details:
Usable goods can lose their selling window. The new areas cover personal care, pet care, flowers and plants, nutrition and supplements, and home products. The initial home offer includes cleaning, laundry and décor. Surplus here does not simply mean a product is about to expire. New packaging can strand the old version. A retailer may discontinue a shade, finish a seasonal promotion or overestimate demand. Too Good To Go’s proposition is to find another buyer for goods that still work but have become harder to sell normally. That gives retailers another way to sell existing stock rather than leaving it on shelves.
There is already a supply base. More than 8,500 stores supply products across these areas, the company says. Around one third already used its food-surplus service. Chief executive Mette Lykke says partners increasingly ask for help outside food, and selected flower, plant and pet-care partnerships preceded this broader expansion. The whole platform’s 150 million registered users and 200,000 active partners describe its starting reach. They do not tell us how many people buy these new products or how often. Nor does the store count mean 8,500 retailers signed up for the first time.
The assortment follows local partners. Examples include personal-care products in France and Poland, nutrition products through sporting-goods retailer Decathlon in Italy, and flowers through Interflora in Denmark and Sweden. The company also names Whole Foods Market flower offers in the United States and Canada. These examples explain the varied local offer, rather than promising every category everywhere. The expansion changes an existing channel: a 2024 account from BIPA’s parent REWE described the Austrian drugstore chain selling food bags through the app while donating non-food products outside that scheme. That historical split shows why adding personal care is commercially meaningful; it does not prove donations will disappear.
MarketMaze Take: The opportunity extends beyond rescuing perishables. Retailers anywhere can recognise the problem of useful stock stranded by a packaging or seasonal change. Too Good To Go is trying to make its existing audience and partner relationships useful across more aisles. The commercial test is how much additional value that route actually recovers.
Cash and space are the useful measures. The company says surplus ties up money invested in stock and occupies shelf and storage space. A further route to shoppers could release both. The existing food-partner overlap makes this an expansion within some retailer relationships, alongside recruitment of others. That is a more concrete starting advantage than a large registration total alone.
Recovery still needs a comparison. REWE’s earlier donation route is a reminder that stores already have ways to move unwanted stock. The launch gives no common non-food merchant fee or measured category profit. Participation therefore cannot establish that marketplace sales beat existing markdowns or donations. A wider catalogue opens another option; its net value remains unproven.
Sources: Retail Gazette, Too Good To Go, REWE Group
