Anyone who's passionate about fighting food waste while saving a few bucks might be familiar with Too Good To Go, an app that helps you rescue surplus food from restaurants and grocery stores for a fraction of the original price. The app's homepage contains a list of "Surprise Bags" containing various food items, from baked goods to groceries, that you can reserve and pick up during specific time slots.
And Surprise Bags are just that, an absolute surprise depending on the surplus food these sellers have at the end of the day. For one Twitter user and Too Good To Go customer, Blair Cole, surprise doesn't even begin to cut it. In a tweet that's now been viewed 6.5 million times, Blair shows a screenshot from the app of his confirmed Surprise Bag that he's reserved from Aldi for £3.30 (about $4.18 USD) followed by a video of the haul.
"So here is the Too Good To Go haul," he starts off saying while holding a prepackaged meal of "Korean-Style BBQ Beef." The camera then pans as Blair laughs and says, "What else did we get? Oh, we got 36 blocks of cheese!" He then shows what is, in fact, 36 individually wax-sealed blocks of cheese. Twitter, of course, lost it — and you will too when you see the video.
The jealousy is real, y'all.
Long-time Too Good To Go users were disappointed that they had yet to win the cheese lottery.
As an added bonus, Too Good To Go also shared a newsletter a couple of days after CheeseGate, which provided a recipe for mac 'n' cheese. "If you have ended up with more cheese in the fridge than room in your stomach, don't let it go to waste — you can use that very cheese to meal prep a freezer-friendly mac 'n' cheese," it reads.
There was also a short and sweet response from Aldi UK.
However, Blair wasn't alone in his experience. After seeing his cheese haul, others began sharing the Aldi Surprise Bags that indeed surprised them. Like @HolliePlus, who received 14 sandwiches from the grocer.
Or @tivnne's 36 sausage rolls and lots and lots of bread.
When reached out to for comment on Aldi's Surprise Bags, Too Good To Go told BuzzFeed, "While we don't mandate what our food selling partners put into their bags, we do give a recommendation that the value is approximately 50% to1/3 off the retail cost. When reserving in the app, the consumer is able to see the original value, though there are times wherein the value of what they pick up exceeds this amount if the partner has additional surplus."
According to the company, their partners are trained when they're onboarded, and they would much rather see the surplus in the hands of a customer than thrown away.
Which isn't too dissimilar to the Eataly Surprise Bags that are highly coveted in NYC (although on the pricier end at $7.99).
