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Food Waste

Q&A: Goodr’s Jasmine Crowe Talks About Her Plan To Build a $100 Million Company Addressing Food Waste & Food Insecurity

Last month, food waste reduction and food insecurity startup Goodr raised an $8 million Series A funding round.

When Jasmine Crowe founded the company, the Atlanta-based startup used technology to help large food service providers reduce food waste. Over the past two years, Goodr has expanded its business to provide expertise to companies looking to provide food to those in food insecure situations.

I wanted to catch up with Crowe to ask her about how the business has evolved, the challenges of raising venture funding as a Black founder, and where she sees the company going in the future.

You can read the full interview transcript below.

Before this most recent round, you’d managed to operate without a lot of outside funding.

We really just bootstrapped. To date have done more revenue than we’ve done in funding, which is something I’m personally proud of.

What was some of the thinking behind deciding to go after new funding?

It was really about scaling up to meet our demand. We had so many big deals that we were bringing in, so many new customers that we were onboarding. Because we have always been really lean and capital efficient, we’ve also had a very small team. So it really got down to ‘hey, we need to, we got to get more people in the door.’ And so that’s kind of really what happened. I was like, ‘I’ve got to raise money because I’ve got to hire more people.’

This round comes at a time where we are seeing a pullback in venture funding. You were right in the midst of that pullback.

We definitely were 100% all involved with that market change and it was scary. It was really scary because we just didn’t know. When I started raising funds in the market in late September, October of last year, and I remember one of my investors was like, ‘oh, Jasmine, your numbers are so great, look what you’ve done.’ At the time, I had only raised like $1.4 million or whatever prior to so we were like ‘you’re going to be able to raise this money so easily, like this is going to be the fastest money you’ve ever raised’. And it definitely wasn’t that. I think we had some struggles with it.

When did you notice the winds of change?

It was March of this year. We had an investor that we were working with, and then they were like, ‘Oh, the market is changing, we’re gonna have to protect our downside’. And they tried to give us these really just terrible terms. There was a lot of that. For me, that was scary because we were at a time when we were trying to grow the company and ultimately, this was happening, and I was very afraid we weren’t going to be able to do it. But we made it through.

When I first talked to you in 2017-18, some of the company’s focus was on food waste reduction using technologies like blockchain. That was part of Goodr’s pitch early on. Through the pandemic, you really moved to help people in a time of food insecurity. So talk about how the business has evolved over the past couple of years.

At the start of the pandemic, we were extremely busy, because so many businesses were closing and we were giving all of their food as you can imagine. So eventually, I thought ‘You know what, you got to go back to what you’re really good at Jasmine and that’s helping people. You got to get back into the groove of like making sure people have access to food.’ And so we spun up the hunger solution side of our business. We made it very clear and very easy to work with us to address food insecurity in a community. So we began working with customers like the NBA, and Accenture, and State Farm, who wanted to do something with a lens of being positive, of being in the community, and giving people that dignity. We’re still helping businesses reduce their food waste, but we’re working on the food insecurity side as well.

Is there still a blockchain-oriented component to your food waste reduction solution?

We do have two use cases. One is a smart contract with our nonprofits, where when they sign for the deliveries, there is a letter of donation letter that goes into our clients’ platform that their signature somewhat creates. And so we have an agreement with them to do that. And then there’s one use case on Ethereum just really showing how the food is moving, who’s getting the food, what time it was received. It’s there, but we pulled back from it because it was becoming super trendy.

How would you describe the food waste reduction platform and the technologies?

The best way to describe it is we inventory everything it is that a business sells. We make it really easy for them to request a pickup. So this is a one stop shop for those clients. They’re clicking on the items that they have, they’re requesting a pickup and we’re leveraging our APIs and our technology to aggregate different drivers for the logistics of getting that food picked up and then delivered directly to those nonprofits.

What it also does is it converts for every single pound of food that we keep out of landfill. It’s converting that to a lot of sustainability metrics that our clients are using, such as how many meals are provided, how many people, who the food is going to, how many pounds of CO2 emissions that they’re helping to prevent. We have a dashboard that also says to them, ‘this is equivalent to this many gallons of water, this many trees kept off the road.’ So it really helps them to tell a story around their sustainability initiatives.

Who is your typical customer?

We have a lot of large corporations. Our big customers like the food service customer. So we have the Sodexos, the Aramarks, the Compasses, those are essentially our customers. And then we work with their locations to roll out the service. We serve companies like Nike, Oracle, LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs, Capital One. They’re our customers, but we’re really getting all the food if that makes sense.

We know that the tech industry has too many white guys. When you went out there to raise funding, as a Black founder, was it more challenging for you? What barriers did you find?

It was definitely hard. An article I saw last week made it clear that the amount of funding that was going to Black founders has gone down. I was really focused on the business in 2020 and 2021, as opposed to I think probably focusing on trying to get the money in. So it’s hard, and it didn’t get easier for us. But what I will say is, I felt like I still went out there and went after it the right way. It wasn’t easy for me, and I probably should have gone out sooner. In hindsight, I think that was the thing that I missed out on. Going out in late 2021 hurt me because it started to slow down a little bit.

Tell me about your current like footprint in terms of cities and reach.

In terms of revenue and customer size, our top five markets are Atlanta, Washington DC, Dallas, Denver. We’re seeing a lot of work like in the tri-state area; we have a lot of customers in New Jersey, Philadelphia, New York area.

We’re really trying to expand what our client base is. We operate in about 26 cities right now, and our goal is to really be everywhere in the United States. We just want to be in as many places as we can. And eventually, probably not with this round of funding, but we’re going to start looking at what it looks like to have some kind of North America expansion, most likely, throughout Canada or Mexico.

I understand the food waste reduction side monetization model. Can you talk about the business model for the food insecurity management side of the business?

It’s such a big span. I think a lot of people, because it’s so charitable, they don’t look at it from a business standpoint. Billions and billions of dollars are spent on an annual basis trying to feed people. Now Goodr is coming in with this as a systematic solution, saying what this many, with this amount of money, this is how many meals we’ll be able to provide this many families.

So it’s a managed service?

It’s a cost-plus model. Our customers will come to us and say ‘we have a budget of $50,000, we’d like to service families that are food insecure.’ We then create a menu, we do the entire activation. So it’s a cost plus. They’re paying an administrative fee plus the fee for all of the food.

What’s the big plan five years from now? What do you want Goodr to grow into?

I think it should be worldwide. Ultimately, within five years, we are tracking ourselves to being a company that’s making $100 million a year. I think we could get there within five years. Our goal for 2024 is to be about $25 million, and so really to see ourselves double year after year after that. Food waste is becoming such a bigger problem, so people are finally paying attention to it. When I was first getting started with this company, ao many people just didn’t believe it was a big issue and they didn’t think it was a big deal. And now, I think people are starting to understand food waste is a problem and what can we do to address it. More and more customers are coming to us, and it’s a blessing.

Thank you for your time.

You’re welcome.

Germany-Based Mushlabs Scores An Infrastructure Partnership with Bitburger Brewery Group

Hamburg-based biotech startup Mushlabs may have created the perfect storm in its approach to creating a clean, nutrient-rich plant-based meat alternative. The company can hit the ground running without worrying about costly infrastructure and potential distribution partners by applying its proven technology and a sound business approach.

Mushlabs has announced a relationship with Bitburger Brewery Group, a large private brewery in Germany. Bitburger will provide capacity and sidestream byproducts from its beer production as raw materials. Mushlabs intends to enhance and use these local byproducts to cultivate edible mushroom mycelium in a precision fermentation process. The mycelium will be used to produce nutrient-rich, minimally processed foods.

“(Bitburger) has a valuable sidestream that would otherwise get burned to produce energy or go to cattle, but is also not necessarily super stable,” Thibault Godard, Chief Science Officer at Mushlabs, told The Spoon in an interview. “So we are offering them a solution to upcycle in a way that is also better for the planet.”

Godard boils the complex process down to a simple example: “I like the example of coffee. For instance, coffee has 80 to 90% of waste from the crop to the cup. And this is also something where you have valuable nutrients there that you can recycle and produce food. So we are basically taking the leftovers and injecting them into the food system.”

The approach—that is, using mycelium, which has a property that acts as a natural decomposing agent in precision fermentation to create a healthy plant-based protein is what Mushlabs called fulfilling the goal of a “circular economy.”

“In natural ecosystems, fungi recycle nutrients through a specific fermentation process that digests their surrounding biomass,” the company explained in a blog post. “At Mushlabs, we harness this process to produce food from agro- and food industries’ side streams (i.e., spent coffee grounds, fruit peels, and sugarcane bagasse). This is a unique form of food production with many potential applications for the circular economy, yielding tasty meat-alternative products.”

And then there’s the smart business angle. While other companies in similar adjacencies struggle to raise large sums of capital to scale out their facilities with large fermentation tanks, Mushlabs’ partnership with Bitburger will accelerate its growth. Using often underutilized brewing tanks, Mushlabs avoids the cost of new infrastructure. CEO and founder Mazen Rizk acknowledges collocating with Bitburger gives his company a giant boost.

“And not only saving the cost, but it’s also saving the time. Because if we now decide we want to build the facility, I think ordering steel would take you probably a year and a half because there are delays in even ordering steel. Then building a facility is very costly and takes time,” Rizk says.

“When you’re talking about food products. It would be best if you did it in the most economically viable way possible so we can find a sidestream that the mushroom can grow on,” Rizk says. “So part of it is understanding what kind of product you can do, what kind of taste, what kind of nutrition they provide. The other side is understanding which one is economically feasible. How can you produce it at a high yield and low cost to ensure that you have a food product that can go into the market at a price that people can afford?”

In June, the company also boasts a huge financial acknowledgment from the EU’s prestigious EIC Accelerator Program. More than 1,000 startups and small businesses from Europe applied to receive a share of €382 million in total capital. Seventh-four companies each will get funding of up to 17.5 million Euros, with Mushlabs receiving an eight-digit figure. Through the EIC Accelerator program, the EU aims to support technology startups that address societal challenges and drive breakthrough European innovations.

Here Are Four Tech-Powered Lunchboxes That Might Help You Fight Lunchflation

Everything is getting more expensive lately, and food is near the top of the list.

For those of you who work outside of the home (and don’t have free and tasty food as a work perk), you’re probably trying to figure out how to fight the suddenly very real problem of lunchflation. The easiest and most obvious way is to pack your own lunch, but often times food tossed in a brown bag or a plain old lunchbox (Evil Knievel or otherwise) doesn’t stay warm or cold enough or whatever needs to be done to optimize freshness.

Luckily for you, we live in an era of feature-packed lunchboxes. Models with everything from temperature zones to hydro flasks to stackable compartments and more give everyone from school kids to lunch-toting nine-to-fivers an abundance of options for bringing a meal along for the day.

And things are about to get even better. A new generation of tech-powered lunchboxes is on its way to help make eating homemade lunches outside the home an even better experience. Below I take a look at four of these new options coming to market for those looking to pack up their lunch for work or school:

The Sunnyside Solar-Powered Lunchbox

The Sunnyside lunchbox features a solar panel on the top of the lunchbox to charge its 10000mAh power bank, which powers the onboard cooling and heating (or both). The Sunnyside’s heating system utilizes induction coils to heat the food, and the built-in cooler uses coolant and fans to chill the food.

Perhaps most surprisingly, the company claims the whole thing can be thrown in the dishwasher – including the solar panel top and the electronics-filled bottom. Even so, I would definitely hand-wash the box and lid since I don’t think it’s a good idea to put any electronics in a dishwasher.

For some, a solar-powered lunchbox may not make sense, especially if you mostly work inside an office, live in a less-sunny locale (hello from Seattle), or don’t get a chance to put the box outside during your busy workaday routine. That said, my guess is the Sunnyside – which has a USB port to charge phones with the power bank – can also be charged via USB like a typical power bank.

The Sunnyside debuts on Kickstarter later this week and will go for $59 backer price and for $125 retail.

The Steambox Steam-Heating Lunchbox

While a plain-old thermos or insulated bowl might keep your meal mostly warm until lunchtime, why not add a little steam to heat things up and keep your food moist? That’s the idea behind the Steambox, a steam-enabled lunchbox that debuted on Kickstarter last year and made a splash at CES in January.

The Steambox features a sealable inner container, two steam outlets, an app, and Bluetooth connectivity to control and monitor your device (it also has on-device on/off controls) and a bamboo lid.

The Steambox has shipped to backers, but if you want to buy one now, you can order on the website (if you’re ordering this month, you’ll have to wait a couple of months before it’s shipped).

The Jarsty Food Storage System

The Jarsty system isn’t a lunchbox so much as a food prep system, where the food containers can be used to store meals, either raw or fully cooked. The Jarsty can also be used in the microwave and heat (or fully cook) the meals. The containers, which are vacuum-sealable and can be thrown in the dishwasher, come in various colors.

I could envision committed meal-preppers storing a week’s worth of meals in advance in a Jarsty system. The company behind Jasty just wrapped up a successful Kickstarter campaign, but I imagine they’ll make a purchase option available on their website soon.

The Forabest Electric Lunchbox

While all o of the other lunchboxes above are not quite here yet, there are a variety of electric lunchboxes you could buy today on Amazon and other online retailers. The Forabest electric heating lunchbox is one of the most popular, and you can buy it on Amazon today for about $40. The system features a car charger and 110V power cord and takes about 30 minutes to warm a meal.

Israeli Company Wants to Create a Greener Future Through Compostable Plastic

Like many transformative ideas, the genesis behind TIPA, an Israeli company with a novel way to reduce plastics in the environment, came from the need to solve an obvious problem. Daphna Nissenbaum, TIPA’s CEO, and co-founder was bothered by the mountain of plastics around her and wanted to find a solution that would benefit her son and others moving forward.

“If you think about nature’s packaging, such as an orange peel, or banana peel,” TIPA’s vice president for North America, Michael Waas, told The Spoon in a recent interview. “We don’t see the Mt. Rainier of banana peels or orange peels because they all break down. And so (Nissenbaum) thought, ‘I need to do something about this for my kids’ and turned her focus on finding a compostable solution inspired by nature.”

For TIPA, it’s all about flexible plastics—those water bottles and food packaging that may wind up at a recycling center but are challenging to become part of a circular economy where materials can be reused for another valuable purpose. Founded in 2010, TIPA’s vision for flexible packaging is to create compostable packaging with the same qualities as conventional plastic, such as durability and shelf life. In particular, for food packaging, compostable material will add days to the freshness of bagged produce and other foods.

Waas explains that TIPA uses polymers that are both bio-based and petroleum-based, which seems contrary to the company’s overall mission. “You’re probably thinking that doesn’t make any sense,” Waas said about petroleum-based polymers. “You can have fossil-based, petroleum-based polymers designed to be fully compostable and bio-based polymers that are not compostable. So, it’s two different challenges. One is the source of the material, whether it’s coming from oil or a bio-based source, and then what happens to it at the end of life. And so TPA uses a combination of both bio and fossil-based, but absolutely everything we produce is certified compostable.”

“We spend a lot of time working on what works and what doesn’t,” Waas added.

TIPA takes a broad approach to the business side of creating a viable system for the circular economy. The Israeli company can manufacture packaging for clients or provide the compostable film to clients or their packaging partners. “We focused on developing the IP and the technology around the solutions. Then, we work with best-in-class manufacturing partners to produce the film or the laminate,” Waas said. We’re doing that because it allows us flexibility for customers.”

The EPA points out that composting enriches the soil, helping retain moisture and suppress plant diseases and pests; reduces the need for chemical fertilizers; encourages the production of beneficial bacteria and fungi that break down organic matter to create humus, a rich nutrient-filled material, and reduces methane emissions from landfills and lowers your carbon footprint.

Creating a compostable future is an obvious path to a greener world, but are consumers ready to make an effort to go through the process of composting? Several surveys indicate that most consumers would compost if it were more accessible. More than 180 communities in the U.S. have composting programs, including such cities as Portland, San Francisco, Boulder, and Seattle have city-wide composting programs.

Even with the ready availability of municipal composting programs and consumers’ general sense they would use composting if made available, Waas believes that consumer education is critical.

“We work with our customers to help them communicate that the package is recyclable because we want this packaging to end up in the right facility, whether that’s in somebody’s backyard or at an industrial compost facility,” Waas said. “And that means consumers have to know that it’s compostable and put it in the right place.”

After Getting Derailed by COVID, Smart Food Container Startup Silo Attempts a Come Back

Back in late March of 2020, Silo CEO Tal Lapidot had a decision to make. The dark clouds of a global pandemic had gathered overhead, threatening to derail his company’s progress on finishing a product he’d been working years to deliver.

The product, called the Silo food storage system, was a new take on a stale category where most everyone used the same plastic containers their parents had used before them. The Silo featured lots of cool bells and whistles, including a built-in scale, Alexa integration, and spoilage notifications. The big idea, though, was a vacuum seal system that promised to extend shelf-life of food by up two to three times.

It turned out that lots of people liked the idea of a better food storage system and the company was flying high when it ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in 2018 that raised over $1.4 million. I was one of them, becoming backer #2531 after I plunked down $219 for the ‘enhanced basic’ reward package that included the Silo base and four containers. The promised ship date was April 2019, but after having backed a few hardware projects before this one, I knew ship dates were less hard promises than loose guidelines.

Lapidot and his team had been regularly posting updates on the progress of the company on Kickstarter, and the backers were, for the most part, both understanding and encouraging. With COVID-19 infections spreading and a whole lot of uncertainty about the virus, Lapidot felt he had no choice but to send his workers home. He posted an update on Kickstarter letting everyone know about the situation:

We hope this update finds you well, and you and your loved ones are staying safe. Since our last update, the world has changed in terrible ways. Unfortunately, this has significant implications for all businesses, including ours.

Silo recently had to pause all operations as the whole team is under stay-at-home orders, which, unfortunately, also caused the delay in sending this update. As a hardware startup, we have tried at first working from home, but this has proven to be highly inefficient as we cannot make actual progress without our team having access to our office lab and equipment.

Mothballing the project meant bringing his team back from China, where the company had been working with a contract manufacturer preparing to build the product. They’d already invested in the tooling for the product manufacturing run, one of the most expensive parts of building a hardware product.

“The idea was, once COVID subsided a bit, we would restore the operations, ” Lapidot told me in a phone interview. “But as you know, that took longer than expected.”

A couple of years longer than expected. While a big part of it was due to an inability to work on the product both in their office in Israel and on-site in China, an even bigger issue was the company soon ran out of funding. Although they’d managed to raise an impressive amount of money with their Kickstarter, the cost of engineering a product and manufacturing systems for over 5 thousand backers would cost much more than $1.4 million. Lapidot had expected this and managed to find investors for the company, but once COVID hit, one of them got cold feet.

“When COVID erupted globally, I got a phone call saying ‘hey, listen, we’re not going to transfer the funds’,” Lapidot said.

From there, with a furloughed team, stalled operations in China and a lack of funds to get things going, Silo entered a period of stasis as Lapidot just tried to keep the lights and preserve the company’s assets while he searched for new funding.

“The situation sort of stagnated, and we tried to figure out how we can get back on track.”

Two years on, things are finally starting to look up. The company has found a new investor to help fund the production run for the product, and now Lapidot is working to get the company back to where they were in the spring of 2020 when the world shut down. A big part of that is trying to reassemble a team and ramp up engineering and technical talent.

“We basically just send everyone home one day, and so there was no organized process of preserving the knowledge,” Lapidot said. “So we have everything, and now we’re trying to get to where we were.”

Other challenges include a lingering lack of critical components due to COVID-related supply chain disruptions. And then there are the continuing travel restrictions to China as the country tries to tamp down a new wave of COVID infections.

“We cannot travel to China because it’s 21 quarantine days just to enter, and it’s not very simple even to get that approval,” Lapidot said. “So it’s going to be a bit more challenging because we have to work more remotely instead of being there.”

According to Lapidot, the company has enough funding for an 18-month runway for the company, and his focus is on getting the first units of the product built. He has started building an engineering team and has reestablished ongoing contact with the manufacturers.

The biggest challenge, according to Lapidot, will be securing the critical components they need to build the final prototypes. They need those to finish debugging the system to prepare for manufacturing, after which they plan to send out factory-made units later this year.

In the meantime, Lapidot knows that the early goodwill he had among backers has evaporated as his updates have gone silent since last July as he has tried to figure out how to get the company back on its feet. Like many stalled Kickstarter projects, most of the messages from backers nowadays are less words of encouragement and more of the “what happened to my money?” variety.

Lapidot told me he plans to apologize to the backers and that he will be transparent about where things are in an upcoming update.

“I know people got hurt from the situation and I feel horrible. We didn’t want this situation. I’ve been a backer on the Kickstarter community for a while. Being in the doghouse after you have seen it from the other side, it’s not an easy experience.”

Lomi, Unboxed: A First Look at The Lomi Smart Food Waste Composter

I find food tech fascinating – especially the products and solutions that have a shot at fixing a real problem in our food system. Tackling issues like food waste, food insecurity, nutrition, and accessibility, technology can give us the tools to change habits and systems.

But, I admit I haven’t always adopted tech in my own home that has made a huge change in our own food habits outside of our beloved sous vide, and nothing that stuck when it came to food waste. With growing kids, our grocery bills keep increasing, but I throw out more food on busy weeks than I’d ever like to admit.

Composting at home has never been an easy or…neat endeavor; we’ve tried several times, using smaller receptacles to collect food scraps to bring out to a larger pile. But no matter what, we abandoned our efforts for lack of time and patience. One year, we even subscribed to a service that would drop off nutrient-dense compost soil for us to use in our vegetable garden. We paid someone for THEIR broken-down food scraps — and it turns out, nutrient-rich, locally harvested, hand-delivered compost is not cheap.

“I just want a Keurig machine….but instead of K-cups, you put all your food scraps in and that’s it!” I complained to my family.

Cut to me coming across an article last summer on the new Lomi food composter – made by sustainable tech company Pela and pre-ordering one. Several months later, this showed up on my doorstep:

The Lomi is meant to be a smart kitchen countertop device, and it takes up a bit less space than a KitchenAid mixer, so we’ve made room for it on the counter above our trash and recycling. It is designed to be a mostly “set it and forget it” appliance, not requiring hand stirring like traditional home compost piles. Reviews rave about how quiet the machine is as it churns waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer in less than a day (and regular dirt in just 3 hours.)

The machine also ships with LomiPods, small bioorganic tabs that Lomi recommends using as an accelerator, especially if the compost will be used as a soil enhancer in a garden or landscaping. The pods are placed right on top before a cycle is run with 50 mL of water.

With seemingly easy instructions for regular operation and daily use only involves learning what can and can not be tossed in for composting, we plan to have our nine and four-year-old kids learn alongside us. We’re expanding our vegetable garden this spring and summer, too, so they’ll be able to see how the food we eat can be used to grow even more food.

One aspect of the Lomi I’m excited about is it’s the first traditional compost or dehydrator appliance to accept some bioplastics, including compostable plates and bioplastic utensils (a full list of approved items can be found here.) This is a cool feature and gives us another reason to stick to a composting habit. I also think this feature may encourage Lomi households to purchase more biodegradable household goods now that they have a more direct method to discard the materials.

We are already using our Lomi and will have a full review up with videos in a few weeks – stay tuned.

Google Doubles Down on Food Waste Reduction, Gives $1 Million to ReFED’s Catalytic Grant Fund 

While Google has long focused on making sure they run their kitchens efficiently and minimize food waste, the pause on food service brought on by the pandemic gave the tech giant a chance to step back and evaluate how they could do an even better job.

Now, with workers heading back to the office, Google plans to double down on food waste reduction. In a new initiative announced yesterday in a blog post by Google’s VP of Workplace Programs, Michiel Bakker, Google will aim to cut food waste in half for each employee and send zero food waste to the landfill. The effort will achieve its aims through an increased focus on food sourcing and procurement, improved monitoring in the company’s kitchens and cafes, and ensuring food is repurposed or disposed of properly.

The new initiative builds up efforts by Google to fine-tune their kitchens using cutting-edge technology. At the end of 2020, the company took an initiative that had been in development in its moonshot factory called Project Delta, which had helped grocers like Kroger reduce food waste and started rolling it out to its kitchens across Alphabet. The company also uses machine vision technology from Leanpath to help their chefs monitor where food is going and how much is going to waste.

While it’s easy to think a company like Google relies solely on high-tech approaches to reduce food waste, efforts over the past two years have relied on a variety of creative approaches ranging from engineering employee behavior changes to rethinking the company’s food systems.

In an interview with Fast Company, the head of Google’s Food for Good program, Emily Ma, describes one example of how the company looked at ways to prompt behavior changes in Google employees through simple nudges.

“Even the size of the scoop you get makes a difference,” Ma says. In a few cafes, the company serves plated meals, so cafe staff can control portions, but that isn’t a viable option everywhere, she says. At a buffet, shrinking the size of plates or bowls helps since people otherwise often end up taking more than they actually want to eat. Simple signs reminding people to just take what they need—and that they can always come back for more—can also help.

The company is also working to change its meal recipes to use more upcycled food and is working to create more circular food systems within Google. In one program, the company has been testing feeding food scraps to black soldier flies, which are then fed to chickens which lay eggs that Google buys back.

Finally, Google is working with other organizations to help push the industry towards more data-driven solutions to end food waste. As part of the new effort, Google has donated $1 million to ReFED as an anchor funder for the food waste reduction organization’s new Catalytic Grant Fund, a five-year initiative to distribute $10 million in recoverable and non-recoverable grants to organizations working on initiatives across the food waste prevention.

“We aim to drive technology, process, policy and infrastructure innovation where it is most needed, because we know the biggest impact will come when the entire industry is empowered to keep food from going to waste,” said Ma in the announcement made with ReFED.

Food Waste Innovators Wanted

If we could pick one thing in the entire food space that technology could truly solve, it would be food *waste.* It has always been an issue that has a ripple effect up and down the food chain, and the statistics have only gotten worse since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.

The team at the food waste non-profit ReFED works daily to provide data-driven solutions to reduce waste and loss in the food system — and that work is the topic at the 2022 Food Waste Solutions Summit held this year on May 10-12 in Minneapolis, MN.

Food waste doesn’t just happen at the consumer level, though about one-third of the 1.4 billion tons of waste happens after the food has been placed on retail shelves or taken home to consumer kitchens. But food waste – or food loss, as some experts note – also happens earlier in the supply chain, either during manufacturing, transportation and at the very beginning at the agricultural level.

Part of the Food Waste Solutions Summit is to discover and discuss innovations designed to tackle food waste at all levels of the food chain. The Spoon has partnered with ReFED to host a session showcasing innovative technology solutions to reduce food waste, specifically in agriculture, supply chain, and consumer categories — and we’re on the hunt for the creators, entrepreneurs and problem-solvers innovating in those categories to come and tell us their story.

Applications to speak during this innovation showcase are open through Friday, March 4. If you lead any organization innovating in the above-named categories, fill out the quick application. If selected, speakers will be included in a brief “fireside chat”-style conversation with the session moderator and audience Q&A. 

We’re looking forward to meeting and hearing from food businesses, funders, policymakers, entrepreneurs and non-profits all working to solve this complex, global issue. For more info on the 2022 Food Waste Solutions Summit hosted by ReFED, visit their site.

*Note: The Spoon is a media partner for this event; this post is not part of any paid campaign.*

CES 2022: Hazel Technologies Wants to Extend The Life of Perishable Food

Food waste startup Hazel Technologies started by creating solutions that could integrate into the existing global food chain by taking aim at food packages. In a sit down interview at CES 2022, CEO Aidan Mouat explained the way they think about their solution the way you would with a traditional tech stack. “Hazel is creating a chemical stack where our technology acts as the biochemistry layer to existing food packaging. The inserts are activated using atmospheric chemistry to control certain parameters in perishable food shelf life during storage and transit,” he added.

Today, Hazel Technologies are also working on the supply side, tracking as perishables get from distributors and farms to the grocery shelf. They’re also collecting data, looking at logistics and partnering with larger brands to optimize their own packaging and shipping procedures.

Food waste is clearly going to be a big part of the conversation in the world of food and tech this year. We’re not only seeing hardware and software innovation from food and kitchen companies but in biochemical innovation in places like packaging to keep food edible and safe longer.

Don’t miss this conversation on sustainable packaging tech and the impact on waste with The Spoon’s Mike Wolf and Hazel Technologies’ CEO Aidan Mouat at CES 2022.

CES 2022: The Spoon Interviews Hazel Technologies' Aidan Mouat.

CES 2022: Uvera’s Smart Food Storage Uses UVC Light To Kill Bacteria

If you’re like me, no matter how hard you try, you end up throwing out food.

And while I recognize most of that waste is on me – a huge part of reducing food waste, after all, is being more mindful about how much is made and remembering to eat what’s already been purchased – I am also pretty convinced that better food storage technology could help me better manage and reduce food waste.

This is why I was intrigued to see the Uvera home food storage system at CES. The Uvera smart food storage system is similar to the Silo system in that it has a base unit that will vacuum seal containers to extend the life of food stored in the device. However, what sets the Uvera apart is its use of UVC light.

Why UVC light?

According to Uvera CEO Asrar Damdam, UVC kills bacteria, which helps extend shelf life and make food after.

“UVC light creates a sterilized environment,” Damram said. “It destroys viruses and bacteria such as COVID-19, salmonella, E.coli, and H1N1. So UVC light alone can extend shelf life of food, but now we’re combining vacuuming as well to increase shelf life even further.”

According to Damdam, the company will begin offering the Uvera food storage appliance via a crowdfunding campaign in March of 2022. Let’s hope the company has better luck than the Silo, which is over two years late and hasn’t updated its Kickstarter backers since July.

You can see Damdam explain the Uvera smart food storage system in the video below.

CES 2022: A Look at the Uvera Home Food Storage System

How California’s New Food Waste Law Could Catalyze Interest & Investment in Tech-Powered Food Recovery Platforms

Starting next year, California’s Senate Bill 1383 will begin to require businesses and consumers to separate food waste from their garbage and put them into “green” bins for proper composting.

The legislation, passed in 2016 by then-governor Jerry Brown and the California state legislature, also will begin requiring tier 1 food businesses (grocery retailers, food distributors, food service providers) to divert 20% of food destined to be thrown away to food recovery organizations by the year 2025.

While I think it’s a good thing that everyone in California – both consumers and businesses – will eventually be required to start composting, I’m more interested in how SB 1383 could catalyze interest in platforms that help put food destined for the waste bin on someone’s plate instead. After all, while composting is a net positive from a climate impact reduction perspective, it’s also the last stop on the food waste recovery and mitigation express. In other words, when food feeds someone instead of ending up as fertilizer, everyone wins.

Image Source: CalRecycle SB 1383 Overview

The timing is good for the law, partly because the pandemic has driven home the realization among businesses that it’s their responsibility to try and divert food to local food banks or other food recovery organizations as good corporate citizens. And of course, it also makes good business sense, since by redirecting food to food recovery organizations, these businesses can also claim these donations on their taxes.

As grocery retailers and other tier 1 food businesses ramp up their food diversion efforts, there are some organizations that could help them along the way. One of these companies is Goodr, which offers grocery retailers and other food-related organizations a tech platform and associated service to help them get excess food in the hands of food charities. Goodr sprang into action in its home market of Atlanta during the early days of the pandemic and showed it could really make an impact. Other organizations such as Quest also provide food diversion services and food waste audits.

One of the challenges of a food recovery program is just having the ability to track and manage potential food waste. There are a number of technology platform providers such as Afresh and Crisp that give grocery providers tools powered by machine vision, AI, and other cutting-edge technologies to better predict and manage fresh food inventories. There are even food robot companies like Simbe developing technologies to help assist in food waste reduction management.

Finally, there are marketplaces like Olio and Too Good to Go that enable grocery retailers, restaurants, and other organizations to list excess edible food for sale on a highly-discounted basis to local consumers. While food sold on these platforms will not count towards the company’s 20% food diversion requirement, using them will help a company reduce the overall amount of food wasted and help provide low-cost food to consumers.

But what I am most excited about is how SB 1383 could give rise to new solutions to help food retailers and foodservice providers waste less food. New regulations often serve as catalysts for innovation, giving large businesses a new reason to invest in core technology infrastructure. As SB 1383’s regulations begin to go into effect, innovators with good ideas for new technology to help companies reduce food waste and redirect excess food towards food insecure citizens will have a growing market opportunity for their solutions. This growing opportunity will likely attract more venture investment for a category that has, at least in the past, had a hard time convincing investors there was enough of a market to garner them a return on their investment.

Foodoo.ai Applies Machine Learning to Reduce Food Waste in the “Grab & Go” Sector


Almost all workplaces and college campuses offer a vending machine filled with snack items such as chips, pretzels, cookies, and candy. While shelf stable, these sugary and salty snack items are less nutritious and not nearly as tasty as fresher options like fresh sandwiches or salads. And yet these long-lasting, less healthy items persist as a mainstay in the office vending machine because fresh items expire three to four days after they are prepared, therefore increasing the risk of these products ending up in a landfill.

Foodoo.ai wants to change all that by giving offices the ability to offer fresh food without all the food waste. The Czech Republic-based startup’s mission is to provide food delivery to offices with what it calls “zero waste nutrition.” The company works with certified commercial kitchens to prepare fresh, healthy food options, delivers them to workplaces, and then uses its proprietary software and hardware to ensure little to no food is wasted.

Once Foodoo.ai’s kitchen partners finish prepping individually packaged fresh food dishes like sandwiches, veggies and dips, soups, and salads, the company then attaches an RFID (radio-frequency identification) tag to the outside of the packaging. This tag contains important information like the dish’s name, the ingredients, and the expiration date; all of this information is sent to the company’s data center.

Foodoo.ai has developed a proprietary hardware kit that can be installed into any existing refrigerator, mini-fridge, vending machine, or other food storage unit. Without the need to develop its own smart fridge or vending machine, Foodoo.ai can scale faster while also giving customers a lower-cost option that doesn’t involve swapping out their fridge.

The hardware system consists of scanners that keep track of product stock and the expiration dates. The data that is collected from the hardware is sent to Foodoo.ai’s cloud-based software, which uses machine learning to provide insight into the shelf life of products, how much product is left at the end of the day, anticipated consumption rate, user behavior, and what products are in high demand.

The grab-and-go food market has become increasingly more popular with millennials. Prepackaged, short shelf-life food items were originally considered low-quality food, often associated with gas stations or corner markets. Now, prepackaged grab-and-go food is depended on by office workers, college students, travelers, and those working or visiting hospitals.

Most people have particular food preferences, dietary restrictions, and allergies, and unfortunately, grab-and-go food cannot be customized to accommodate this. This might lead to customers picking at certain parts of the dish, and throwing the rest away. If customer demand and traffic are not accounted for, this can quickly lead to packaged fresh foods expiring and being thrown out.

According to Foodoo.ai, about 17 percent of the food it delivers to workplaces is wasted. As the company’s artificial intelligence gleans more information, Foodoo.ai believes its system can gain even more insight into food preferences and consumer behavior and help to reduce the amount of grab-and-go food wasted.