Florence Gibbs-Price was excited to try her first Too Good To Go box when she managed to pick one up from Asda, but was left fuming when she realised what she’d been given
Picking up a Too Good To Go box is always a bit of a gamble, but this woman was in for the shock of her life when she opened up a £4.40 mystery box from Asda, as the contents were far from what she was expecting.
Florence Gibbs-Price, from Yorkshire, said she was excited to finally try using the Too Good To Go app when she managed to bag herself an order from her local Asda Express. The app is a marketplace for surplus food that helps supermarkets, cafes, and restaurants eliminate food waste without throwing it away by selling it for a fraction of the usual price.
Shoppers cannot buy specific items from the Too Good To Go app; instead, they buy surprise bags that contain a selection of whatever goods the shop was due to throw away. Sometimes this can mean getting your hands on several discounted bakery treats, but other times it can leave you disappointed.
And for Florence, her experience with the Asda surprise bag was definitely less than ideal.
She had picked up a bag that was advertised as potentially containing sandwiches, fruit, vegetables, and tinned goods. But when she got home and looked at her haul, she found seven lettuces, 13 bags of salad, and one fruit pot.
The 24-year-old woman said: “I was shocked that it was all the same thing – and way too much for even a family of four to consume in one night. The app said [it would be] sandwiches, fruit, vegetables and tinned goods, so I was hoping for more of a variety.”
Florence filmed herself unpacking her surprise bag and uploaded the video to TikTok. In the video, she looks visibly stunned as she takes several lettuces out of her bag.
In the clip, she exclaimed: “It’s all salad! You should see the state of my kitchen right now – it’s just lettuce. What the hell am I meant to do with all these vegetables?”
Commenters on her video joked that her only option was to buy a pet rabbit or guinea pig to help her eat all the salad before it went off, especially as the vegetables were already discounted with a yellow sticker to denote that they were approaching the end of their shelf life.
Florence said she complained to Too Good To Go about her lettuce-filled order and received a £2.20 voucher. Although she does plan on using the voucher so it doesn’t go to waste, she won’t be using the app after that because the ordeal “definitely ruined the experience”.
She added: “I think it’s a bit of a joke, but I’d rather make the most of the voucher and try again at maybe a different store. But after that, I doubt I’ll use it [Too Good To Go] again.”
Too Good To Go states on its website that their bags are a surprise because surplus food is hard to predict, so if lettuce is the food item that needs getting rid of, that’s what you’ll get in your bag.
They write: “We’ve found that the best way to combat wasting surplus food is by giving stores the flexibility to distribute whatever they have left at the end of the day, which can vary.”
They also acknowledge that sometimes customers won’t like the food that’s in their bag. However, they suggest that to ensure nothing gets wasted, any unwanted food gets passed on to family, friends, or neighbours.