Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Spoiler Alert

Copia Helps Cap Food Waste and Connect Non-Profits with Excess Food

When you talk with startups trying to combat food waste, you hear a common refrain: you can’t get to absolute zero–there will always be some waste in the system. While we may never hit zero food waste, Copia is a software company fighting to get as close to that as possible through a combination of prevention and recovery.

Based in San Francisco, Copia offers a suite of web apps to help companies that produce or purchase large amounts of food track, analyze and manage inventories. Their customers include organizations that make food, such as the UCSF Medical center cafeteria, and startups like Lyft that provide catered food for employee meals.

With Copia, these clients can track how waste is occurring, such as over production or over purchasing a particular protein, and where in the organization waste is occurring. A site like UCSF provides meals for patients, meals in a commissary as well as event food, and Copia helps them figure out where loss is occurring in which line of business. According to Copia, UCSF has actually reduced its edible surplus by three percent month over month through 2017.

Copia is among a cohort of companies that are using software and analytics to help companies manage food inventories. Others in the space include LeanPath, which provides cafeterias with a scale to precisely measure pre-consumer waste, and Spoiler Alert, which works with large food distributors to move excess inventory.

Unlike these other startups, however, Copia also provides a recovery solution on the back end. When there is excess, Copia’s app can help connect this unused food with a non-profit in need. Additionally, Copia’s software will also help companies figure out and calculate tax benefits for any donations made. In the Bay Area, Copia even employees its own set of drivers and can deliver food within the city of San Francisco in 12 minutes, or 26 minutes across Silicon Valley. Copia says that it redirects 60,000 pounds of food a month to non-profits in the greater Bay Area.

In an age of increasingly conscious capitalism, Copia also helps bolster the brand image of its clients. Customers can showcase how much food it has recovered or waste prevented or water saved both externally and internally.

Copia currently has 15 employees and according to Crunchbase has raised $140,000 in seed funding. The company operates in the Bay Area, Denver, Austin, Dallas and will start up in Los Angeles next month.

Zero food waste may be impossible, but watching startups like Copia reminds you of how much is possible to improve both the lives of people in need and our planet.

You can hear about Copia in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill. 

Spoiler Alert’s Software Helps Food Companies Steer Clear of Spoilage

Spoiler alert! The enterprise software startup, Spoiler Alert, works to help large food manufacturers, distributors and grocery distribution centers better manage their inventory to help reduce food waste and recoup potentially lost revenue.

Hopefully that doesn’t ruin the rest of this story for you.

It shouldn’t, as Spoiler Alert is one of the many companies using technology to tackle the very real problem of food going unused. Based in Boston, Spoiler Alert offers a business intelligence and relationship management platform that lets companies that move large amounts of food better understand their inventory and navigate when unexpected surpluses happen.

Unsold food inventory happens for a lot of reasons. Severe weather can interrupt transport, a buyer can cancel an order, or someone in the office could just be really bad at ordering the right amounts. Spoiler Alert’s software lets companies put this excess food to use, whether that’s finding an alternate buyer, turning it into a donation, or connecting it with a composting facility.

Let’s say TomatoCorp suddenly finds itself with a ton of extra tomatoes. These tomatoes are not spoiled and totally fine to eat.

Typically, TomatoCorp would have to go out and manually find someone to take the excess inventory, and hopefully do it before the food spoils and has to be thrown out. This takes time and pulls already busy people off the work they normally do.

With Spoiler Alert, this process is more automated. In this example, TomatoCorp has uploaded all the SKU data about the tomatoes, as well as the partners and buyers it does business with. Spoiler Alert will look at the surplus and help the company connect with potential buyers in its network, or with non-profits that can take the tomatoes as a donation. The software even compares whether a straight sale or the tax benefits of a donation are more economical for the company.

Spoiler Alert also helps companies understand their own ordering with granular tracking, so if it’s actually a person in a particular department that is consistently over ordering, the company can address that problem so it’s no longer a cause of inventory mismanagement.

Founded in 2015, Spoiler Alert has 11 employees and received a $2.6 million seed round from Acre Ventures (which is backed by Campbell Soup Company). The company operates in 19 states and counts Sysco among its clients.

Spoiler Alert isn’t the only startup looking to help get extra food into the right hands. Copia‘s platform helps organizations donate excess food, Imperfect Produce sells “ugly” produce at a reduced rate, and LeanPath sets up a scale and camera in cafeterias to help monitor and reduce pre-consumer waste.

But the folks at Spoiler Alert think their biggest competition is the status quo. Organizations are fine doing things the way they’ve always done them and don’t want to learn anything new. The easier companies like Spoiler Alert and others mentioned here can make it to put that surplus food to work, the better it is for our communities, our planet and (spoiler alert!) the bottom line.

Want to talk about this story and other foodtech news? Join our foodtech Slack community and jump into the conversation.

You can hear about Spoiler Alert in our daily spoon podcast.  You can also subscribe in Apple podcasts or through our Amazon Alexa skill.