David Niles will go to great lengths, or depths, to save food from going to waste: Sometimes, the 63-year-old goes dumpster diving near his home in Brooklyn, New York.
The far more sanitary digital version, Niles says, is an app called Too Good To Go, where retailers like restaurants and bakeries sell “surprise bags” of leftover food at discounted prices, usually between $3.99 to $9.99 apiece in the U.S. He’s spent nearly $10,000 to pick up almost 2,000 surprise bags on his bicycle over the past four years, he says.
Too Good To Go, a Copenhagen-based company founded in 2015, brought in just under $162 million in revenue in U.S. dollars last year, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It — primarily by taking a cut of each surprise bag purchase and collecting annual membership fees from retailers.
In the U.S., the company typically takes $1.79 per bag and charges an annual …