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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Goodr

Bite Ninja’s New Funding Shows Operational Efficiency Is What’s in for Restaurant Tech in 2022

Despite the constant flood of doomsday headlines as the dark clouds of recession gather overhead and consumer behavior regresses to the mean post-pandemic, not all news is bad news these days when it comes to restaurant tech. In fact, some startups seem to be doing just fine, particularly those whose mission it is to help restaurants save money.

Take Bite Ninja, who this week announced an $11.3 million funding round. The company allows fast food restaurants to outsource their drive-thru through Bite Ninja’s cloud-labor platform. Bite Ninja employees can remotely staff a drive-thru from their home anywhere in the country and can also work multiple drive-thrus during the course of their shift.

The ability to spread a single worker across multiple restaurants and treat drive-thru labor as an “elastic” resource that can be spun or down dynamically during the course of a day is a radical rethink of a core part of a fast food restaurant, coming at a time when most fast food restaurants are struggling to hire employees. According to the announcement, Bite Ninja is currently running trials at five of the top twenty quick-service chains in the US.

Other companies that help restaurants and retail become more efficient and bring cost-savings to operations continue to thrive and get new funding despite what many see as a large-scale downturn in food tech funding. For example, Galley Solutions, a company that helps restaurants more accurately predict and optimize their food inventory, raised $14.2 million this spring. Hyphen, a startup that is building plug & play automated makeline solutions, raised a $24 million Series A in February and saw additional follow-on investment by Chipotle in June. That same month, food waste reduction startup Goodr raised a $8 million funding round in early summer. Last month, Afresh, a company that enables food retailers to optimize their fresh food inventory and reduce waste, raised a $115 million series B.

If 2021’s restaurant tech funding was all about ghost kitchens and digital transformation, the big buzzwords for 2022 are operational efficiency and cost savings. Startups that can help streamline operations using automation, cloud computing, AI, and other transformational technologies will continue to do okay, particularly those that help restaurant operators deal with acute labor shortages and rising costs of doing business during rising inflation and persistent supply chain disruptions.

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.

Capital One Ventures Makes First Impact Investment in Food Waste Specialist Goodr

Capital One Ventures, the venture arm of financial services giant Capital One, has invested in food waste specialist Goodr. The investment, the amount of which was not disclosed, was announced via a Medium post by partner Adam Boutin.

From the post:

Jasmine and her team are tackling one of the most baffling paradoxes — 80 billion pounds of food is ending up in our landfills every year, meanwhile 40 million Americans are food insecure. While most of us are aware that food waste and hunger are massive problems (with both environmental and societal implications), the scale & complexity of the issues is astonishing….

The investment marks the first move by Capital One Ventures into impact investing. According to Boutin, who is leading the impact investing efforts for the venture arm, they plan on making more in coming months in the areas of financial inclusion, environmental sustainability and future of work.

We’ve been writing about Goodr here at The Spoon for some time, in part because the company is one of the first startups to utilize blockchain as a way to better track food and help reduce waste. Here’s how company CEO Jasmine Crowe described the company’s platform back in a 2018 interview:

Goodr is a sustainable waste management platform that leverages technology to reduce food waste and combat hunger. We provide an end-to-end solution for businesses seeking to reduce their overall waste, save money and empower their local community.

Our technology coordinates the collection and distribution of food donations. Unlike our competitors, Goodr’s platform also provides an IRS audit-friendly donation record, real-time food waste analytics, and community impact reports thanks to blockchain.

In addition to providing a technology forward platform for helping corporations reduce how much food they throw out, Goodr’s also extremely active on activating partnerships in communities of need to make sure the food ends up in the right place. It’s been inspiring to watch Crowe and her team spring into action over the past year to help those hit hard by COVID-19 with efforts like their pop up stores and emergency meal kits.

Goodr is one of a number of startups in the food waste and sustainability space that are getting extra attention nowadays from investors. While food waste reduction and innovation hasn’t always gotten as much investor attention some of the other food tech spaces, COVID-19 shined a light on the fragility of the food system and made it even more clear how reducing waste made good economic sense.

Goodr Delivers Groceries and Surplus Food to Hungry Students, Seniors in Atlanta

“Hold on, I have to get my credit card.” Jasmine Crowe, CEO of Goodr, was grocery shopping in the middle of our call earlier today. She was at the store not stocking up her own pantry but buying grocery staples for one of the dozens of families that are using Goodr’s expanded program to get fresh food during this tumultuous time. 

Goodr is an Atlanta-based startup providing the logistics needed to redistribute surplus food from large businesses (think: Coca Cola, Chick-fil-A, etc) and to non-profits feeding the hungry. And with the coronavirus outbreak shutting down schools and, consequently, taking away free lunch from students, Goodr is stepping up to make sure that kids in the Atlanta area still have healthy food to eat.

To feed students, Goodr is working with school cafeterias which are still preparing packaged meals. The company picks up and delivers these meals to designated apartment drop-off zones in areas where many students live. They’re on track to deliver meals to over 40,000 students in the Atlanta school district.

Separately, Goodr is introducing another new service to drop off groceries to families who can’t afford to (or aren’t physically able to) shop themselves, or can’t make it to food pantries. “It’s like Instacart, but it’s free,” Crowe explained to me. Since the grocery delivery service doesn’t rely on surplus food, Goodr pays for the groceries through individual sponsorships (you can do it too, if you like).

In addition to grocery and student meal drop-off, Goodr is also delivering fully prepared meals cooked by partner chefs to seniors that might be hesitant to venture out and purchase food, or don’t have the financial ability to do so. Crowe said that the seniors have the option to ask that the food be dropped off outside their door to reduce the risk of contamination. Finally, the company is increasing the frequency of Goodr’s pop-up surplus food grocery stores.

These emergency initiatives are all happening on top of Goodr’s current surplus food deliveries from offices to nonprofits. “It’s still business as usual,” Crowe told me.

To increase their delivery capacity Crowe said that Goodr has hired 10 new drivers. They try to hire drivers that were recently laid off from their jobs and pay them $20 per hour. Crowe told me that Goodr uses the Google Maps Paperboy API to direct drivers through the most efficient routes. Currently, one driver can deliver groceries to six or seven families in an hour and a half. I’m from Atlanta and, knowing the traffic situation there, that’s pretty incredible.

Goodr typically gets a lot of its donations from offices and restaurants, many of which are closed or in the process of closing. Crowe told me that right now, they’re sourcing “a little bit from everywhere.” The company is still getting donations from some food partners, like Mercedes-Benz and Coca-Cola, and is also taking food from companies that are going out of business and clearing out their fridges and pantries. 

Crowe doesn’t know how long those donations will last, however, or how long Goodr will be able to keep the lights on. Like many other food companies, it is not immune to the struggles that come with our new COVID-19 reality.

Nonetheless, Crowe said they’ll keep doing what they can and paying their team for as long as they can. “I’m a believer in good Karma,” Crowe told me as she finished her grocery shop. Then she had to go deliver the food to an Atlanta family, or senior, or student, and do it all over again.

Goodr Partners with Roadie to Scale Up Surplus Food Donations to Those in Need

Goodr, a startup which uses blockchain to help redistribute surplus food to those who need it, announced yesterday that it has partnered with delivery service Roadie. The new partnership will allow Goodr to quickly expand its services across the country.

It is estimated that 133 billion pounds of food go to waste in this country each year. Goodr helps combat this food waste by connecting large enterprises and venues that have excess food with non-profits who need it.

Up until now, Goodr has coordinated a driver to pick up and deliver food donations. The partnership with Roadie is the first time it has outsourced delivery. Roadie offers a crowdsourced “on-the-way” delivery service that “connects people who have stuff to send with drivers already heading that way.” According to the press release, Roadie’s drivers will provide same day delivery of excess food to donation centers like churches and shelters.

Roadie raised $37 million earlier this year and has already partnered with Walmart to provide same day grocery delivery.

Both Goodr and Roadie are headquartered in Atlanta. However, Roadie’s delivery service options are nationwide, which will allow Goodr to rapidly scale up its food donation services, and in turn make a bigger impact in reducing food waste and helping those in need.

It’s smart initiatives like this that put Goodr on our 2019 Food Tech 25 list of companies creating the future of food.

Goodr Launched Free “Pop-Up Grocery” Store Featuring Surplus Food for MLK Day

In anticipation for Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Atlanta-based startup Goodr launched a service project to reduce food waste and feed the hungry in MLK’s home city.

Goodr has partnered with the Atlanta Hawks to launch a “Pop-Up Grocery” event in tandem with the Hawks’ court dedication at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Recreation and Aquatic Center in downtown ATL (h/t Black Enterprise news). Over the weekend, roughly 100 local seniors came out to take advantage of the pop-up, which features free surplus food (like fresh produce, deli products and bread) from Goodr’s Atlanta grocery partners.

This isn’t the first pop-up grocery event from Goodr, which uses blockchain to redistribute excess food from businesses and venues to non-profits which provide food to those struggling with hunger. In a statement to The Spoon, Goodr’s CEO Jasmine Crowe said “Pop-up free grocery stores are a signature Goodr event, and one of our favorite ways to bring food to the gathering spaces and even the doorsteps of people who need it the most.” This particular “store” was only open this past Thursday, to kick off the Hawk’s MLK Day programming, but Crowe said that one of their goals for 2019 is to pop-up in a new place every two weeks.

In this job, you see a lot of companies leveraging technology for technology’s sake. Sometimes it’s really nice to read about a company that’s tackling widespread issues in the food system — like food waste and hunger — head-on, especially on a holiday dedicated to remember the legacy of a man who fought for equity and justice.

When we spoke to Crowe in preparation for this year’s Smart Kitchen Summit, she told us that Goodr has plans to be in 20 cities by 2020. Hopefully that will mean a lot more pop-up grocery stores, a lot less food waste, and a lot more people with access to fresh, healthy food.