Too Good To Go hopes rebrand will appeal beyond its eco-conscious 'niche'

“We are currently quite focused on a niche audience because we naturally appeal to people who recognize the need to fight food waste or to save the planet,” he explains, but the business next needs to garner a “more contemporary mass friendly appeal”.

The Too Good To Go app works by partnering with retailers to sell their surplus food to consumers for a reduced price. It currently has over 130,000 retail partners on the platform and has its food waste information on over 1.7bn products as part of its date labeling campaign.

Traditionally, Too Good To Go has focused its marketing on a “macro-level”, telling users how much CO2 they’ve saved per food package, for example. “That obviously appeals largely to people who are already quite involved and engaged with an environmental cause.”

Too Good To Go has 70 million users across 17 territories and has plans to get to save 1 billion food bags by 2025. Van den Brand says the rebrand has come at a “pivotal point as it’s time for us to scale our impact.”

To recruit a more mainstream audience, van den Brand believes Too Good To Go should be leveraging the feeling of gratification for reducing food waste and rewarding customers. “We want to start celebrating those individual acts of saving food and making people feel proud and even if it’s tiny that they get a bit of a fuzzy feeling inside.” In the past, Too Good To Go’s marketing has focused on food but now its communications will be more “people-centric”.

“To sharpen the position, we will focus on that feeling of empowerment which will flow through all future marketing.”

The logo redesign also had a practical driver. Van den Brand admits the original logo with its three different colors and the lengthy company name was an “absolute nightmare”.

It was challenging to make the logo work on media images or in combination with its retail partners’ logos. “For co-branding it was dreadful, you can’t place it on top of an image or any other background apart from black or white which was not ideal.”

Achieving consistency across its 17 territories is also a core element. “The meaning of the brand, or the essence of the brand is very different in France to what it was in Spain or the US or Canada. Now we have an opportunity to standardize it or make it much more consistent both visually and verbally.”

The rebrand will be phased out in a bid to reduce waste with existing physical assets. Van den brand recognizes this won’t be “ideal from a rebranding perspective but is ideal from a planet perspective”.

Brand marketing pivot

Over the next 12 months, van den Brand will “dramatically” pivot Too Good To Go away from its reliance on performance marketing to focus on brand-led marketing moving the company up the marketing funnel.

“Any company which is six years old or less doesn’t tend to have a super clear brand positioning idea.” He admits the same is true for Too Good To Go. “We had a super clear mission and a clear business model but as a brand, it hasn’t been super clearly articulated.”

Since 90% of the platform’s growth is organic, van den Brand says he’s no longer “worried about user acquisition” and that instead it is time to focus on mass media marketing channels.

“This rebrand is an opportunity to be much clearer and to say Too Good To Go is about the people and the impact every single individual act of food saving to the planet.”