Forsa crossed one million rescued meals. The number is easy to say and hard to earn, because every one of those bags had to be worth buying at the moment it went live.
The matching engine has one job: decide which surplus goes on sale, at what price, and when. Too early and the shop loses a full-price sale. Too late and nobody is still shopping. The window is often less than an hour.
Why 95% off still makes sense at 9pm
A bakery closing at ten has no salvage value for what is left. Anything above the cost of the bag itself is recovered margin, and the customer who collects it tends to come back at full price another day. The discount is not a loss, it is a second chance at revenue that was already written off.
What we learned
Surplus is not random. It follows weather, paydays, school terms and football fixtures. Once the engine started reading those signals rather than yesterday's averages, bags started selling out instead of expiring unsold.