Too Good To Go Expands Surplus Marketplace Beyond Food
Too Good To Go is extending its surplus marketplace beyond food, allowing participating retailers to offer discounted products across five additional areas: personal care, pet care, flowers and plants, nutrition and supplements, and home products. The expansion applies the company’s established redistribution model to a wider range of goods that remain usable but have lost their usual route to sale.
Announced on October 15, 2026, the move includes products ranging from skincare and oral care to cleaning supplies, laundry products and décor. Availability depends on the market and individual store, rather than representing a simultaneous launch of every category across the company’s network.
Retail Partnerships Bring New Categories to the App
The expansion builds on relationships with businesses that already handle surplus inventory. According to the company, more than 8,500 stores already supply products across the additional categories, with approximately one-third previously working with the platform to redistribute food.
The marketplace connects 150 million registered users with 200,000 active partners across 20 countries, according to company figures. This provides an existing customer base and retail network through which the broader offering can develop. Registered users, however, should be distinguished from customers who regularly make purchases.
The rollout includes nutrition products from Decathlon in Italy and personal care offers from INGLOT and Auchan in Poland. In France, consumers may find products from Beiersdorf, Kenvue, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, depending on local availability.
Flowers and plants are available through partners including Interflora in Denmark and Sweden and Whole Foods Market in the United States and Canada. Home improvement retailer OBI participates in Austria, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, with pet food also a particular focus in Switzerland. hagebau offers flowers and plants through participating locations in Austria and Germany.
These examples illustrate how the marketplace is moving beyond supermarkets, cafés and restaurants into additional retail sectors. However, the presence of a retailer or brand in one country does not mean its products are available throughout the platform.
Why Usable Products Become Surplus
Excess stock can arise even when products remain suitable for their intended use. Packaging redesigns can leave older versions on shelves, while changes to a product range can strand discontinued varieties. Seasonal demand and inaccurate forecasts can also leave retailers holding more inventory than they can sell.
For businesses, this inventory ties up working capital and occupies storage or selling space. Too Good To Go presents its expanded marketplace as a way to recover some of that value and connect surplus goods with customers. The company also identifies opportunities for participating retailers to attract store visits and introduce shoppers to unfamiliar products.
Chief executive Mette Lykke said partners increasingly bring the company surplus challenges that extend beyond food. The expansion brings together experience from earlier partnerships involving flowers, plants and pet care into a broader offering.
From an operational perspective, this means surplus management can extend across more departments within the same retailer. Its practical value will depend on whether staff can identify eligible stock, prepare offers and organize collections efficiently. Retailers assessing participation would need to compare recovered revenue with the work involved in handling each offer.
How Customers Access the Products
The marketplace uses the company’s Surprise Bag format. Businesses list unsold products, and customers reserve and pay through the app before collecting their purchases during a specified period.
Too Good To Go’s business website states that Surprise Bags sell for 25% to 50% of their contents’ original retail value. That creates an affordability proposition alongside the waste reduction objective, although the available assortment depends on local surplus rather than a fixed catalog.
For consumers, the practical question is whether the contents meet an actual need. A discounted product only delivers its intended value if it is used. Clear descriptions of product categories, quantities, and relevant dates would help shoppers assess whether an offer suits their household.
Environmental Benefits Require Category-Specific Evidence
The expansion also broadens the challenge of measuring environmental impact. Too Good To Go’s existing food methodology, developed with Mérieux NutriSciences | Blonk, compares a scenario in which food becomes waste with one in which it is redistributed through the platform.
The assessment accounts for factors including waste treatment, packaging, collection, transport and consumption. It assumes that the food is genuinely surplus, that 90% is consumed and that purchases replace an equivalent amount of food that customers would otherwise buy. On that basis, the company estimates that saving one kilogram of food avoids 2.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent.
Those assumptions help explain why the food estimate cannot simply be transferred to cosmetics, plants or household goods. Each category has different production processes, packaging requirements, useful lifetimes and disposal routes. Whether a surplus purchase replaces another purchase also affects the result.
For sustainability teams, this distinction matters when evaluating claims. The number of products sold through a redistribution platform is a useful activity measure, but it does not independently establish the volume of waste prevented or emissions avoided. Credible assessment would require evidence about what would otherwise have happened to the products.
A Broader Role for Surplus Redistribution
The expansion offers retailers another outlet for stock that would otherwise remain unsold. Its longer-term contribution will depend on whether products reach customers who use them and whether retailers also improve purchasing and demand forecasting.
Useful measures would include quantities redistributed, disposal volumes, repeat surplus by category, and revenue recovered after handling costs. Together, these would help businesses determine whether redistribution is reducing persistent waste or simply managing its consequences.
For the wider circular economy, the development illustrates how an established resale channel can expand across everyday consumer goods. The strongest outcome would combine better use of existing products with fewer avoidable surpluses entering the system.
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