If you’ve got a fix for local and a taste for affordable, keep your eyes peeled for Goodie Bag, the Boulder-based discount food service helping local bakeries, pizza places and other restaurants sell their unsold food for a fraction of the price.
According to co-founder Luke Siegert, Goodie Bag has helped put $375,000 back into the pockets of its partners and saved more than 78,000 wasted meals in seven cities across five states. Now the app-based service is partnering with local restaurants to launch in Colorado Springs on April 22, and Siegert says he’s excited to help local diners save money, reduce food waste and foster community.
How Does Goodie Bag Work?
Goodie Bag partners take what would otherwise be wasted food and offer it up in mystery bags on the Goodie Bag app. Listings can come from surplus production, botched orders or missed pickups from food delivery services.
Customers can then see listings from local restaurants in the Goodie Bag app, but they don’t know exactly what’s inside. The tradeoff? The items are listed at a discount of at least half the original price. After purchasing on the app, customers can pick up their food in store. Profits are split between the partner and Goodie Bag.
“It’s funny that it’s taken us so long to get down to the Springs since we are Colorado local, so I’m really excited to see what the reception is there,” Siegert says.
Beginnings of the Bag
Before baking up Goodie Bag, Siegert was a student at CU Boulder serving up pizza at a local Boulder restaurant. There, he realized how much food was wasted. It was hard to see pizza get thrown away as a college student, according to Siegert.
“In Boulder, you can’t grab a decent meal for less than 18 bucks,” he says. “These are two super-wicked problems for food affordability and food waste. How can we make something that addresses both?”
Enter Goodie Bag, or at least the idea. Siegert and fellow co-founder Eddy Connors whipped up the first version of Goodie Bag while still attending CU Boulder. They won the Silicon Flatirons Startup Summer Program pitch competition to receive their initial funding and launched Goodie Bag in Boulder in January 2023. But it was still a rocky road ahead.
Siegert and Conners spent the next 14 months in Siegert’s parent’s basement trying to work with what Siegert called the “jankiest platform imaginable.” It looked challenging early on. The business was not pulling in enough revenue to support the founders, and it was not scaling like they desperately needed it to.
The entrepreneurs caught a huge break and a great deal more funding in the form of a TechStars accelerator program in Minneapolis. It allowed them to launch in Denver and Fort Collins in 2023, and from there it was “gangbusters,” Siegert says.
A Local Pull
Siegert says Goodie Bag’s priorities of helping local businesses and avoiding corporate chain restaurants separate it from similar services.
“[People] want that bomb bacon, egg and cheese sandwich from that local Jewish deli down the street, or a couple slices from Joey’s pizza. They’re not looking for something they’ve had before,” Siegert says.
Bella’s Bagel’s owner, Jason Stele, helped to kick-start the Goodie Bag pilgrimage to the Springs. Stele is happy to see his New York-style bagels find someone’s taste buds as opposed to the bottom of a trash can.
“Because of the amount of time, and energy and love we put into the baking process, I don’t want to see them go to waste,” Stele says.
Stele also says that he hopes Goodie Bag will enhance customer discovery, both by helping current customers try flavors they may not otherwise try and by giving new customers a taste of Bella’s Bagels for the first time.
“It’s like the perfect marriage,” Stele says.
Goodie Bag Restaurants in Colorado Springs
Springs residents can sign up on the app now. Current partners in Colorado Springs include the following local restaurants:
- Joey’s Pizza
- Slice 420
- Bella’s Bagels
- Nourish Juice Bar
- Monse’s Pupuseria
- Cacao Chemistry
- Nacho Matrix
- Odyssey Gastropub
For more updates, you can find Goodie Bag on Instagram and goodiebag.co.
Find more Colorado Springs food news and insights here.
