Market Orientation
The largest base pillar of a service like TooGoodToGo is strong marketing. Since the service is practically capped with the prices that they can earn with a single meal saved they can only meaningfully increase revenue by saving more meals. And what a successful marketing they have. TooGoodToGo is an ever-growing service which has increased it’s yearly saved meal count from 52 million to 78 Million (+50%) and reached 20 million additional users within 2022 [1]. But how did they manage such a marketing feat?
TooGoodToGo is in a challenging situation since they cannot invest huge amounts of capital into marketing. Therefore they have to work with low-budget marketing channels such as stickers and branded paper bags. These are low-cost and still promote the brand at key points in the decision making of customers. Another way in which they excel is in media coverage. The company and it’s services have received more than 25.000 media occurrences [1]. A major part of their marketing channel management is mouth-to-mouth marketing. Since perfectly good food at a fraction the price is a topic which is interesting to virtually everyone this mode of marketing works exceptionally well for TooGoodToGo.
One more interesting aspect is the diversification of products in different countries. Since they operate in 17 countries [1] and each country is different they need a more diverse product portfolio. Not only the Magic Bags where most meals are saved directly from restaurants are a success. Also the recent Magic Parcels target a different part of the food supply chain in that they aim to reduce the waste already in the production or preparation of food by targeting ingredients. To complete the product range they have 2 services targeted at resellers. FoodMemo is handling out-of-date times of various products and helps businesses with forming better decisions about their stock of foods while the often good for longer stickers signal to customers that this product can be consumed oftentimes beyond the run-off date. [1]
The ongoing growth of TooGoodToGo is likely to continue since there is still a great potential in this market. Food waste is not just a pressing issue of society as a whole but also a lucrative business endeavor for all participants. First off there are still a lot more countries to expand to. France alone accounts for almost 60% of sales which all other 16 countries share 40% of meals saved [1]. Also more stores and restaurants have are continuously signing up and therefore there is still great potential even within well-established countries.
Sources
[1] Annual Report TooGoodToGo GmbH https://tgtg-mkt-cms-prod.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/40102/ImpactReport2022_DE.pdf
Notes
- 17 countries
- not only reduction of waste through normal magic boxes
- FoodMemo, software to monitor the out-of-date times of products
- Magic Parcels saving already the ingredients in the production
- Often good for longer stickers - found on store bought products