AWS Podcast #730: The Frugal Architect w/ Werner Vogels: At Too Good To Go, Practical Engineering Keeps Food Out of the Bin
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Jul 21, 2025 Morten Keldebaek, CTO of Too Good To Go, and Robert Hjertmann, a key technology leader, dive into their journey from the fitness app Endomondo to tackling global food waste. They discuss innovative frugal engineering principles that support their mission to connect consumers with surplus food. The duo shares insights on overcoming technical challenges during rapid growth, emphasizing how constraints inspire creativity. They also explore the need for purposeful decision-making in technology as they navigate scaling in varying markets and the environmental impact of food waste.
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2018 World Cup Server Crash
- During the 2018 World Cup, Too Good To Go's servers crashed due to unexpected high demand in France.
- The outage lasted several hours, revealing early scalability challenges in the small tech team.
Database Bottleneck Limits Scale
- Relying on a single database created a hard scalability limit for Too Good To Go.
- Scaling compute without addressing database bottlenecks is ineffective for system growth.
Gradual Architecture Migration
- Migrate critical services gradually to scalable architecture instead of rebuilding everything at once.
- Use caching and handle eventual consistency to improve performance stepwise.