Get cheap restaurant waste with this app — see why it's a 2023 Apple App Store winner

Did you know that restaurants waste a whopping 11.4 billion tons of food each year? Such a shame. Instead of being dumped into a landfill, they should be in our bellies.

The folks behind the "Too Good to Go" agree. This app lets you grab a surprise bag of food waste from a local restaurant — and it's dirt cheap, too.

With Too Good to Go, we all win. Restaurants make some extra cash from garbage-bound food and consumers get surprise leftovers without hurting their pockets.

How does Too Good To Go work?

Instead of throwing away excess fare, Too Good to Go allows restaurants and cafes to sell food destined for disposal. As mentioned at the outset, the surplus grub is sold at a discount.

Stores have no idea what will be left over at the end of the day, so what you get in the bag is a surprise. However, unlike Uber Eats or Grubhub, there's no option for delivery. You'll have to reserve the food and pick it up yourself during a specified time window.

The app lets you zoom into a location of choice, like Manhattan for example, and the app will populate all the stores with surprise bags available. In my neck of the woods, none of the surprise bags exceed $5.99; the cheapest are $3.99.

Too Good to Go is an Apple Store Award winner

Apple placed a crown on To Good to Go as an Apple Store Award winner. It's on the Cupertino tech giant's list for "Best Apps of 2023," particularly for the Cultural Impact category.

"Too Good to Go enables users to minimize food waste by connecting them with restaurants and stores that have a surplus of unsold food at an affordable cost," Apple said, which coincides with the company's own mission of employing environmentally friendly, sustainability-minded measures to make the world a healthier, happier place.

You can download Too Good to Go from the Apple App store for free — and it's available for iPhone and iPad.