Market-Based Surplus Food Redistribution and Household Food Access: Evidence from Too Good To Go

Market-based surplus-food platforms redirect retail inventory that would otherwise be discarded toward households willing to purchase it at a steep discount. We provide the first causal evidence on whether such platforms expand household food access, exploiting the staggered metropolitan expansion of Too Good To Go (TGTG) across fifteen U.S. metropolitan statistical areas between September 2020 and June 2024. Combining proprietary monthly supplier-participation data with 1.66 million household-month observations from the U.S. Census Household Pulse Survey, we estimate heterogeneity-robust dynamic difference-in-differences effects on a four-category measure of household food sufficiency. TGTG entry increases the probability that households report preference-aligned food sufficiency by 1.5 percentage points (2.2 percent relative to baseline) and reduces the probability of preference-unaligned sufficiency by 1.6 percentage points (6.6 percent), suggesting a shift from preference-unaligned to preference-aligned food sufficiency. The estimated effects on moderate and severe food insufficiency are economically small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. Dose-response estimates indicate that marginal gains from additional suppliers are concentrated in markets where the platform is still scaling. Mechanism evidence suggests that the effects operate primarily through an affordability channel: TGTG reduces affordability-related food-access difficulty, with larger reductions among households without mobility difficulty. Falsification tests show no detectable effects on SNAP participation or charitable food receipt, and no detectable gains among households with mobility difficulty. The findings characterize a private, market-based channel that improves preference-aligned food access for households near sufficiency, while leaving more severe food hardship largely unchanged.