Washington cafe cuts food waste by giving baked goods a second chance
At the end of every business day around 6 p.m., Daniel Bates — head pastry chef at ChocMo Chocolatier & Café in Poulsbo, Washington — looks at what's leftover. The unsold items are destined for a new home, as Bates includes them in a varying number of "surprise bags" the Poulsbo cafe can offer, turning surplus pastries — such as cookies, scones and hamburger buns — into another revenue stream and reducing the company's waste.
The bags Bates assembles are made available for purchase on the "Too Good To Go" app, which offers products from restaurants at a deep discount. Pastries in a bag that would sell for $18 total in the morning are offered for just $6, for instance. App users can order, pay and pick up their discounted baked goods the next day. On average, ChocMo sells about two to four bags per business day.
The Poulsbo cafe is the first business in Kitsap County that's available on Too Good To Go. It joined the Denmark-based app to reduce food waste in mid-December. Prior to that, the surplus ingredients were cooked as "family meals" to serve the employees.
"Now we can make sure that it [surplus food] goes to people that are a little bit more hard up, could use discounted food, especially with inflation increase," Bates said.
Too Good To Go is a certified B Corp social impact company founded in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2015 and the app was launched in 2016. The company now has over 100 million registered users and 170,000 active business partners across 19 countries in Europe and North America, according to the company.
The platform has help to save over 350 million meals from being wasted. In other areas some businesses that sell surplus food via Too Good To Go include Whole Foods, Rubinstein Bagels, Circle K, IKEA and 7-Eleven.
A Whole Foods' bakery bag worth $21 is sold for $6.99. A Rubinstein Bagels' surprise bag worth $18 is sold for $5.99. A Circle K Treats & Eats worth $12 is sold for $3.99. An IKEA's restaurant bag worth $18 is sold for $5.99. And 7-Eleven's donuts worth $12 are sold for $3.99, according to the app.
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The head pastry chef said he first heard about Too Good To Go from the ChocMo owner, Peter Crabtree, who thinks the platform fits their business model to not waste food, and from another person mentioning that there is no business joining the app within probably 30 miles.
So Bates started it, because, "I don't like throwing food away. And I like to make sure, again, that people that don't have the money to buy stuff, that they can get things at a discount," he said.
Bates always makes sure ChocMo's surprise bag has baked goods worth $18 or more, he said.
"I always try to make sure I round up," Bates said. "So $20 is okay with me. That goes into the $18 bag. Pushing it to $24? Not so much. I'll save it for another bag."
So far, Bates has heard positive feedback from those who picked up the surprise bags. The only concern that may be raised would be if people constantly wait for the goods to go on sale and not buy them when the goods are fresh.
"But all in all, that's a small percentage of people that would do that. And honestly, I would forgive those people, because the small percentage of people that would do that are probably the people that are the most desperate," Bates said. "They don't go out to eat often because they don't have that $100 to blow on a dinner. Besides that, people who want fresh product, they come in and buy the fresh."
Bates encouraged other businesses to join the platform and help those in need, he said.
"I really do encourage people to do this, because I see almost no backlash, no repercussions from doing this. All you're doing is you're helping people," Bates said.
"Even if you go take a week break and you don't have anything to offer, people are not going to look at you and say, how dare you not discount stuff. So there is really no downside to it."
This article originally appeared on Kitsap Sun: Washington bakery ChocMo first in its county to join food-waste app
