GoodBites Is Giving Cairo Its Own Answer to Too Good To Go

GoodBites is giving Cairo's unsold pastries, sandwiches and restaurant meals a second chance at being someone's dinner, with a new food-rescue app offering fresh surplus food from local cafés, bakeries and restaurants at discounts of at least 50%. The premise is wonderfully uncomplicated: the food is still good, the business would rather sell it than throw it away, and the customer gets a bargain.

The idea has a rather successful European precedent. In Copenhagen in 2015, a group of entrepreneurs began developing Too Good To Go after confronting the extraordinary amount of perfectly edible food discarded by buffet restaurants. The app launched in Denmark in 2016, allowing customers to purchase surplus food at reduced prices, often in surprise bags whose contents were determined by whatever remained unsold. The model subsequently spread across Europe and beyond.

GoodBites is applying a similar approach to Cairo, where predicting how many croissants, sandwiches or slices of cake a business will sell on any given day remains an imperfect science. Customers can browse nearby businesses, reserve and pay for a surprise bag through the app, then collect it during a designated pickup window.