Lucie Basch: revolutionising food waste and consumption with Too Good To Go

This may be the first time you have seen Lucie Basch’s face.

However, she may have been ‘in your pocket’ for 10 years now – that applies to around 18 million French people, six million Brits and 15 million Americans.

Ms Basch is the co-founder of Too Good To Go, a phone app that connects customers to restaurants and stores that have surplus unsold food and that is now available in 20 countries. That means 120 million registered users around the world.

She may also be in your phone under Poppins, her new app that connects people looking to rent items from neighbours and local shops.

A Forbes’ 30 Under 30 honoree in 2020, Ms Basch, 34, recalibrates our relationship with consumption by aligning it with greater ecological goals.

Too Good To Go has sought to do exactly that, articulating a ‘win-win-win’ approach where the food suppliers save edible food from the bin, customers get a bargain price and the planet is spared from food waste and overproduction.

Poppins works on the same principle, using people’s available resources to avoid the purchase of items many of us use only once or twice a year, or once a decade or lifetime even.

The Too Good To Go idea formed between Buxton, York and Tutbury, three Nestlé UK factories where Ms Basch worked as part of a graduate programme she completed between 2013 and 2015.

There, she witnessed a massive amount of food that ended up wasted and wanted to do something about it.

She took a year off to work on it, found out that a team in Denmark was working on the same idea, offered to partner with them and launched the company in France in 2016.

The rest is history, as the company struck an immediate chord with customers, expanded across Europe, the US in 2020 and launched last January in Japan, its first Asian country, three months ahead of the company’s 10th anniversary.

The Connexion spoke with Ms Basch about her experiences working at Nestlé UK, recent launches, and how much she is changing the world.

Too Good To Go has just launched in Japan. How did that compare with Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia?

We spent a great deal of time thinking which was the right country to launch in Asia. We found that Japan has a deeply rooted culture of respect for food.

There is a great deal of fresh produce, both in shops and restaurants, which expires quickly. Companies and people are aiming to cut food waste by more than 50% by 2030. They are also very advanced in their relationship with technology.

Because food is very expensive, people are interested in having access to lower-priced offers. There is a lot of fresh fish and a great deal of plastic packaging, which is actually advantageous in the fight against food waste as products are wrapped and ready to be collected by our users.

We also felt the country was aware of the issue of food waste and that it was important for us to provide a solid solution to the Japanese people.

Too Good To Go, on paper, seems like a ‘no-brainer’. Could it have failed?

There were many ways in which it could have failed, like any company starting out. I did not really ask myself that question.

What mattered was to do something that made sense, something that felt necessary and to give it everything I had. I gave myself one year to make it work. I moved forward day by day, seeing what would happen.

You had not come up with a genius idea, is that what you are saying?

No, I felt I had a very simple and highly collective idea. The number of people who told me they had already thought of it – that is precisely what I liked about it. So many people had the idea that it needed to become a reality.

A happy childhood in Paris’s 4th arrondissement, good grades at school, a graduate of an engineering school, two years working abroad, an idea grounded in common sense and an ‘immediate success’. Could it have been otherwise?

I would not look at it that way. I lost my father at 18, it was a real shock very early in my life. There were two ways to react: either I wallowed in sadness and became stuck or I got moving. That was the day I decided to keep pushing forward. 

My philosophy is to do a great deal of things. I do not see failures as such, they are obstacles. Sometimes I can jump over them, other times I have to go around them. In every case, I keep moving forward.

Too Good To Go was born in the factories of Nestlé UK where you said the working conditions of British factory workers left a mark on you. What did you see?

I saw Taylorism [maximising productivity]. People clocked in the morning. As soon as their break was over, they had to clock in again. I had never had that idea of work. I had always seen it as an occupation that is financially rewarding.

British workers were exchanging their time for money and eagerly awaited Fridays. Mondays were always depressing. That really struck me, I saw that work could also be dehumanising.

It did not affect me as strongly in France, mainly because my experiences there were internships with an end date. In the UK, I was with people who had been working for 40 years.

What was quite troubling was that the workers seemed resigned. They knew they would have to spend 40 years there. It really shaped me and gave me a real connection to a world I might not otherwise have understood.

France is currently discussing pension reform. One part of me – the little girl from the 4th arrondissement with a doctor father and a lawyer mother – thinks that raising the retirement age by two years is fairly logical considering we live longer. The other has seen those workers who truly gave their lives to a job they did not enjoy. For them, two extra years are unthinkable.

When you launched Too Good To Go, many shopkeepers told you it would never work, adding they had tried it themselves previously. French people are often depicted as great pessimists. Was it a ‘French’ thing or a common trait in human beings?

Our brains like habits – that is neurologically proven. Changing means creating new neural pathways, which requires additional effort. If the brain can remain in its usual habits, it will.

When you run a food business and have been throwing things away for 20 years, and a 22-year-old turns up saying, “I think I have a solution,” you tell her “You are sweet.” It is understandable.

My whole fight is about returning to ways of living that are more coherent: good for us, the planet and society. And it is extremely difficult to change habits.

In 2020, in the middle of Covid, you launched in the United States – a project that lasted two years and exhausted you. Why was that?

I was no longer aligned with my values. I was flying twice a week, which is incompatible with ecological values. I was constantly changing time zones between offices on the West and East coasts, I woke very early and slept very little. Food in the US is really not the same as in France. It was difficult.

I think it was youth, the excitement of launching in the United States, that allowed me to shoulder all that. I was jacked on adrenaline because launching your company in the United States is absolutely extraordinary. But it is not normal to be tired all day. It is not normal to have to rely on stimulants such as coffee, sugar or chocolate throughout the day because your energy is flagging.

There is also a different work culture to tackle. I had many employees who told me on Wednesday that they were leaving on Friday. It almost felt like betrayal. It was because they had found a job with an annual salary of $10,000 higher, had student loans to pay back, hospital bills to shoulder for their parents or a tooth cavity that cost $500.

And that one employee who asked whether Too Good To Go’s health package covered leukaemia because her son had it…

That truly struck me. What I had heard about the US, the starkness of life, never felt so true.

There is no safety net, which means everybody is responsible for their own protection. There is far less collaboration and mutual support. How a boss handles leadership affects everyone – it is quite different from European leadership. I found it extremely hard, as an employer, to have to recreate that social model. I missed the French social system.

Did you consider staying, or was it clear from the outset you wanted to come back?

I had given myself two years. It was also the year I turned 29, and I saw all my friends celebrating their 30th birthdays, getting married, having children. Each time, I was not there. I experienced the fear-of-missing-out syndrome [FOMO].

Would you say the cost of success is too high in the US?

It is a country that provides everything for companies, but not necessarily the kind I believe in.

Around 200,000 people have now downloaded Poppins. Are you fighting waste, or overconsumption?

Both. The aim is to offer different habits that help align our economic challenges with ecological and social ones. It is designed to make sharing everyday objects a mainstream habit rather than a niche activity. It lets users borrow or rent items from their neighbourhood, ranging from tools and kitchen equipment to camping gear and baby accessories.

In the early stages of Too Good To Go, many articles headlined with figures such as ‘X amount of meals saved by Too Good To Go in [insert French town]’. Are numbers the best metric to quantify success?

Growth is what interests banks and investors, but we are mistaken about the term. Growth of what? Rather than speaking about growth only from a financial perspective, I want to highlight the idea of “life economy”, coined by Jacques Attali, or economies that do good; those with a humane social foundation and a ceiling that respects the planet’s resources.

What gets me going is the number of meals saved. What gets me going is the number of items rented on Poppins. Only afterwards do I build a company that supports this mission and aligns its revenue with that purpose.

It would have been impossible for me to wake up thinking I was working toward the increase of the company’s turnover. That resonates far less.

You are neither in favour of de-growth nor anti-capitalist.

It is a good thing that capitalism is being deeply questioned.

My position is that we are stuck with it. From where I stand, it is impossible to free myself from economic realities. The best way I can have a positive impact on society is to play by the rules. This model tells us that money matters. My question is: how do we replace money as a means rather than an end?

That is why I believe businesses have an extremely important role to play in transforming our society, because they know how to operate within the rules of capitalism. And since it is the current model, it is up to businesses to help it evolve.

You are also behind Climate House and Plantation Paris, and you were an ambassador of Ma Petite Planète. Is there an ambition to cultivate an ecological ecosystem?

Absolutely. Climate House works as a business incubator for companies with ecological goals. We will soon open an office in Bordeaux. We must bring together people who believe in it – scientists, charities, major companies and start-ups – to accelerate this transition.

Are you changing the world?

(Smiles) I would not put it that way. What interests me is changing people’s daily lives.