Ran Li, PhD, Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at Penn State, will present the EEEP Seminar Series, “Market-Based Surplus Food Redistribution and Household Food Access: Evidence from Too Good To Go” on February 25, 2026.
Abstract:
Private, market-based platforms have emerged as a potential complement to public food assistance by reallocating surplus food into low-cost consumption opportunities. This paper studies whether Too Good To Go (TGTG)—a mobile platform that connects consumers with restaurants and grocery stores selling surplus food at discounted prices—improves household food access in the United States. We exploit plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of TGTG’s staggered rollout across metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and combine data on platform entry with more than 1.4 million household-level observations from the U.S. Household Pulse Survey between April 2020 and September 2024. Following platform entry, households are 1.9 percentage points more likely to report preference-aligned food sufficiency—having enough of the kinds of food they want—accompanied by declines in preference-unaligned food sufficiency (1.2 percentage points) and reductions in moderate (0.5 percentage points) and severe food insufficiency (0.2 percentage points). Improvements in preference-aligned food sufficiency are driven by middle-income households, while reductions in food insufficiency are concentrated among lower-income households. Estimated effects do not vary by the presence of children within households. A wide range of alternative specifications, inference methods, and sample definitions confirm the robustness of these findings.
Bio:
Ran Li is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education at Penn State University. Her research examines how food policies and industry-led initiatives shape household and agribusiness behavior in real-world settings. She draws on primary data collected through surveys and experiments, as well as large-scale secondary data, to identify causal effects. Her recent work evaluates key policy and market-based interventions aimed at reducing food waste—such as organics recycling mandates and platforms like Too Good To Go—and provides evidence on how these initiatives influence firm practices and household food-related decisions.