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Elevate game day at Whole Foods Market. OK, onto the show. And this week we're re-running an interview from last fall with Jasmine Crow Houston. Her company Gooder partners with big companies to make sure their wastes, well, doesn't go to waste. Hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Roz. 34 million Americans don't have enough to eat.
And several million of them are children. And it doesn't actually make sense when you think about it because there is more than enough food to provide for everyone every day. In fact, 40% of all the food produced in the United States gets thrown away. And a lot of that food is perfectly fine. But every day, millions of tons of food are thrown out by restaurants, supermarkets, warehouses, catering companies, hotels, and corporations.
And many state and local laws make it really difficult to redistribute that food to people in need. And to make matters worse, all that food ends up rotting away in landfills that then produce massive amounts of methane emissions. Jasmine Crow Houston is an entrepreneur who became obsessed with these very problems. In 2017, she founded a company called Gooder, which works with businesses to take unused food and deliver it to those who need it.
Now, support Jasmine launched Gooder. She was running an agency that helped black celebrities set up charitable organizations. And on the side, she set up pop-up restaurants and parking lots to serve free food to homeless people in Atlanta, where she lives. That experience would eventually lead Jasmine to start Gooder. You started an organization called Black Celebrity Giving. This was back, I think, in 2011, around the time that you initiated an MBA.
Tell me about that. What was the idea behind it? Yeah, I have been a full-time entrepreneur, which is crazy to think about guy for over a decade of my life. And I originally had this, almost a consultancy, where I was helping celebrities really define their giving blueprint, how they were going to use their star power for Good.
And I built hundreds of nonprofits, and I would create all their programming, help them do their board training, finding their board members, creating all of their program descriptions, and fundraising. And one of the things that started to become a really repeat cycle for me, I realized I was really busy around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and back to school. But other than that, the rest of the year, I was pretty much twiddling my thumbs.
And you were busy during those times of years, because that's when charitable giving ramps up around those times of year. That's when people tend to care. Yeah. Kids going back to school, let's get school supplies. It's Christmas time, let's get gifts to kids, the stuff like that. Exactly.
And one of the days I said to one of my clients, and this is around Thanksgiving one year, and I'll never forget I said, hey, you know the people that are standing in line for a turkey in November, are also hungry in October. Yeah. That this was not just a, you're only hungry, you know, two or three times a year, you could find yourself experiencing hunger anytime during the year.
And I think that my celebrity clients were just really focused on playing football, basketball, you know, being hip-hop stars, R&B legends. And it didn't really stick to them. And one day I was driving through downtown Atlanta. I drove through an area that was really highly populated with homeless populations. And I thought, you know what, I need to start doing something. And so I went home and I posted on Facebook, I'm starting this initiative called Sunday Soul.
Every Sunday, I'm going to be feeding people, you know, come out and join me. So, all right, so you were driving through the street to Atlanta, and you know, like you see I'm in the Bay Area, and you saw, on how people living in tents and people, you know, without regular food, you posted on Facebook that you wanted to feed people. And what was the idea that you would just cook a bunch of food and bring it to a location, and that was what you would do?
Yeah, the idea was that it would be like a good Sunday dinner. Like if you go to church or you're just relaxing, you know, whatever it is that you do on a Sunday, but you typically have that good Sunday meal, that was my idea that I wanted to give people experiencing homelessness, dignity, and a really good meal. And so it was a mixture of like a good soulful dinner, and you know, old school music, so like the temptations, the Jackson 5, you know, Rita Franklin, that was the mixture.
And so I would rent tables and chairs and linens and print out these menus that used to just be so funny, but I was letting people feel like they were at a restaurant, even though we were in a band-in parking lot or behind a building. And so you would basically have friends and whoever wanted to be involved, bring food, and you would serve like 50, 100 people at a time. Oh, no, no, I was serving anywhere from 3, 50 to 500 people at a time.
So it was a big thing. Yeah, I would start doing the shopping on Wednesday and start doing the cooking on Friday for an event that was on Sunday. So it was a pretty big undertaking. And you would do like pasta spaghetti and just things that you could make in large quantities. Yeah, for sure. I got really good at making chicken and making pasta because of course before the food inflation, those are more affordable.
But it would be multiple things because that was the thing guy. I wanted to give people an opportunity to just have dignity and choice. And so we weren't just giving them, hey, here's this peanut butter jelly sandwich, you're hungry, just take it. So they got a chance to order an appetizer, a salad, an entree, two side items, and then they would get a choice of a dessert as well. So it was like a real restaurant.
And you would just set this up in a parking lot in Atlanta and asking people to donate because it probably was a lot of money to do that. Oh, yeah, certainly was a lot of money and I got smart, you know, I would start to if I was going to do fried chicken, I would order the fried chicken from like a grocery store and pick that up and, you know, ask different groups to pitch in like $5, $10. I also put a lot of my own money into it as well.
So you basically decide on your own to basically feed people on the weekends and and a lot of times you'll see church groups do this or nonprofit groups do this and you were just on your own just thought, you know, there are not enough people feeding people are hungry. You felt like you needed to do something 100% I felt like there were people that were feeding people there is a lot of initiatives.
But I felt like people were not getting the dignity and choice that people like you and I have what we're hungry. It was just like, hey, take this food, you're hungry, have it. And I want it to do better. I want it to essentially, you know, do good. I want to just step back for a second ask you in general about the problem of hunger in the US because you've given a TED talk about this and everyone listen to go see it.
It's so good. But I was and I guess I shouldn't be amazed because I've been in this profession, my profession for more than 25 years, but 40% of the food consumed in the US is thrown away every year. That's what I read. Is that true? It's true. And that equates to about 80 billion pounds of food.
So if you can imagine a billion, right, that sounds like a lot. And then you think 80 billion. I mean, this is a lot of food. I mean, that what what is it? It's not the food that we throw away from our plates. It's like things that the grocery stores and Costco and Kroger throws away. It's right. Is that we're talking about?
You know, it's from the farm to the fork. Waste is taking place. So there's farmers that are having to plow things under when we saw huge instances of this during the pandemic. You saw those stories of Idaho potato farmers that, you know, had a waste millions of pounds of potatoes because people stopped ordering.
So you see that you you see the food that's not perfect when it gets to this store. I can't tell you how many truckers give us calls all the time because if they're late, say they're sitting on in traffic. Because there's a bad accident on the highway and they get to that grocery store that distributions in our late.
They can have the whole truck refused. And so now you have 18 willers of probably 20 pallets worth the food items that now these truckers are like having to figure out how they're going to get rid of it because they've got to go and get another load of food. It's the it's the events that we go to right how many times have you been to a wedding or a conference and you know you're sitting in that ballroom.
Oh yeah, the cruise ships. I mean, I was at a conference maybe about two weeks ago and you could see that they had planned for let's say a thousand people. I mean, there were hundreds of tables and every table was already preset with a salad and bread on the table. Yeah. And I looked around and there must have been at least 20 tables that were completely empty.
Wow. Yes. I mean, we've all experienced that. And so we're talking about it's it's totally insane. I mean, we we produce so much food in this country and waste so much food in this country. And so so this is a fact. And I don't even know what percentage of methane and carbon emissions come from landfills in the US must be very significant. Exactly. Project drawdown last year said that food waste was the number one thing that we could do to combat global climate change.
And just to give you some aspects food is the single largest source of everything that's in a landfill. And just by being there, it brought away in release of emissions. Exactly. It releases harmful methane gas emissions. And in beyond that, I mean, when you think of where landfills are and you think about poverty and you think about health outcomes and social determinants of health. It's really bad. Yeah. On every level.
The second thing I want to kind of ask you about is how people are fed, right? So there are I'm in the Bay area here has obviously a huge, you know, crisis, you know, with unhoused people. And it's shocking when you see it here in Atlanta, there's also challenges in cities like Atlanta, New York, Chicago, et cetera. Most people who who cannot afford food, who need to be fed, how do they get it? Where do they get it from?
Yeah, there's a lot of different resources. There's certainly churches and synagogues and, you know, there are feeding and having different programs on a daily and weekly basis. There are soup kitchens that still exist. A lot of times if they are experiencing homelessness, they are sometimes in a homeless resource program.
So whether they're staying at a shelter, they're going to the shelter for certain times it could be like it's too cold outside or there are storms and they know that there are places to go where they can actually get food. And then there's people like me who are bringing food directly to people that are living on the streets on a daily basis.
All right. So while you were doing Sunday, so what did you start to see that you realize as a problem? I mean, were there gaps in what these other groups and organizations and agencies were doing that that you saw did. I mean, did you see an opportunity to innovate in a new way? Yeah, there were a lot of things that I saw. One thing I started to see a lot of families that would be there on a daily basis.
Every time I was feeding, they were there. And one time I talked to the family and I'll never forget they were a family of nine. You know, so husband, wife, seven kids. And I remember I would say like you guys are here every week because I watch them, you know, get out of homelessness, get into a house, you know, start trying to rebuild.
And one day the dad said, you know, we have to sell our food stamps every now and then just so we could pay our rent. And I mean, not really that stuck to me and he wanted to know when we were going to be there so that they could come and get food because it was a consistent good amount of food. And he knew his family was going to get a good meal. So I saw that I saw that people were really desperate for food.
So even if they had food stamps or all the things that we think make people have access to food, there's still a lot of struggle. And that people when they have to make a choice, am I going to pay for my rent? Am I going to pay for my car payment? I'm going to pay for medicine or am I going to pay for food food is often the first to go.
But the biggest thing that happened with this guy is I woke up one morning in February of 2016. So by this time I've been feeding on the streets for almost four years. In a video of one of my restaurants went viral. I had a 15 second video on Instagram. There was nothing but just little pictures and they captioned it.
Look what this group did for the homeless in Atlanta. And people started tagging me in the video. And I woke up and there was like all these friend requests and one of the reoccurring questions that people kept on asking me was who donated the food. And I started to think like I don't get enough of this food donated and I go to Google like so many people do and I literally Google what happens to extra food at the end of the night from restaurants.
And I will say I fell into the deepest rabbit hole. I remember like it was yesterday, being up until almost four o'clock in the morning, reading a Harvard Business School, their food law policy had done like a 83 page report on food waste. Reading through this and I am blown away with how much food goes to waste in this country, thinking about the millions that are hungry and realizing weight.
We waste all the food that could feed all the hungry and it just was like a aha moment like, hey, I've got to connect these two. I'm going to take a quick break when we come back more from Jasmine Crow Houston, the founder of Gooder, you're listening to how I built this lab. I'm Dairaz, stay with us. I just learned, discovered credit cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you've earned.
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Welcome back. I'm Guy Roz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. And my guest is Jasmine Crow Houston, the CEO and founder of Gooder. So you basically go down this rabbit hole, you discover what we've just been talking about that all this food is wasted. Most people don't know that. They don't know that 40% of our food is just ends up thrown away, right? I didn't know it. Yeah, yeah. I didn't know it.
And so you start to read this. And clearly the gears start to turn your head. You're thinking, maybe this isn't a food problem. Yeah, I think that's exactly what it is. And the other thing that started to happen to it was around the emergence of the food delivery. And you know, I'm like, wow, all this technology is being created to get food faster to people like you and I, but who's going to build something for the have nots the millions of people that don't know where their next
food is from who's building for that. And we have all this food going to waste all these people that are going hungry. Why are we not trying to build something that will connect those two together in the interim solve two really big problems. I mean, we're talking about all this food going to waste all these people going hungry and we're not we're not solving it. And that's really what I thought I could do.
Basically, you've land on this notion, this concept that it's really a logistics problem, feeding people in the United States should not be. It should not be a struggle. There's more than enough food for everybody in the world. And essentially, most of the time, a lot of food that's thrown away is still perfectly safe, perfectly good to eat, right.
More than you would believe for sure. I mean, for example, there are rules that govern like shelf life of food, right. Sell by dates, etc. I mean, on any given day, you can probably go behind a supermarket and see what they're throwing away and much of that food is perfectly safe and consumable, right.
100% still till this day, I probably get no less than three to four, either emails, tags on social media posts of people every day people going to a grocery store, seeing this perfectly good food that gets thrown out. But I think that's where one time a lady and it's funny because she she said she actually got in trouble for it, but a Walmart in Atlanta, the power went out and I mean went out for less than 20 minutes, right.
And as of that, they were throwing away everything in their freezers and everything in their coolers. And so she calls us and she was like, Hey, I don't know if you guys can get here, but we're about to throw all this food away. So we get up there, we bring like I think we had like a you haul truck, one of our vans.
And I was, I mean, the everything that's in the freezer. So all this food just all of it, just going away. So I'm like, Oh my God, like does this happen every single day. What's funny guy is if we go to if we go to Walmart, we go to a grocery store and we purchased groceries.
What if we stop someplace else chances are we don't even make it home in 20 to 30 minutes, right, we put this food in our refrigerator and freezer and it's perfectly fine. But because of this fear of litigation, this fear I'm going to get in trouble.
If you know, this food isn't perfectly great, it does go to waste. And I remember the day that we did that and we took that food to different senior homes. And this had to be thousands of dollars, thousands, I mean, maybe 20, 30,000 dollars worth of food that we were able to give to these seniors that would have gone to waste and it was it was perfectly good food.
All right, so 2017 you decide to found good and the idea is let me build a logistics company that essentially can find and deliver food to people who needed. First of all, I think a lot of people will be surprised to hear that it's a full profits, not a nonprofit, not a charity. So why did you decide to go to go that route rather than a nonprofit or charity organization?
Yeah, you know, and you know this about me right guy. I knew all about nonprofits. There was that was the thing that I knew. I mean, I have been building nonprofits for however long. So that's that I knew the reason why I decided to go for a profit right as soon as I realized that it was definitely this logistics problem was that businesses were already paying to throw the food away.
Like that's what I realized that was kind of like the way they were paying people to haul it off. They're paying people all it off this perfectly good food. They're paying companies to come and get it and throw it in landfill. Which oh, by the way, it's terrible for our environment, a leading contributor to global climate change, you know, a huge problem in itself. And so I thought wait, I'm going to come and offer these businesses a sustainable way to deal with their ways.
And it's going to help their community. It's going to save them money, both via tax deductions that they're going to get for donating the food that's edible, but also by paying for excess waste pickups that they don't technically need. And they're going to help their community. They're going to it's going to be good on the environment.
And it's going to help feed people and that that was a business and and for the first year of the business, every company that I spoke to was like, Oh, we can't work with you because you're not a nonprofit. It was like what? And then it started to make real businesses because they were already paying waste companies to throw the food away. Also, I mean, if you were a nonprofit, you would be spending 95% of your time fundraising, raising money from anyone anywhere.
Oh, all the time. Like I was I would say 99% of my time fundraising and just never knowing, you know, when the next donation was going to come when the next grant was going to come, nonprofits are hard business. Yeah. All right. So you decide to run as a for profit and the idea was that that essentially companies restaurants, grocery stores catering companies, they're already paying people to haul away their food waste.
And most of it, what we call food waste is actually food that hasn't been eaten consumed still packaged in many cases, many cases. And so your your idea was, well, why don't we just essentially be the waste management provider? Why don't we deal with that exactly? That's exactly what I thought. And it was interesting because I didn't want to use the term waste because to your point, this isn't all wasted food. A lot of this is surplus food.
So we started offering a service, what I called surplus food recovery, your excess food and what I told the clients that we were doing is we were solving their surplus food supply chain problem because right now they were just throwing it all in landfill. And what we could do is help that edible food get to people in need, but the food that was not edible, there were other uses of that then putting it in landfill, we could recycle it. We could turn it into animal feed.
There were other use cases for it that it didn't have to go to waste. And so that's what really helped us kind of think that we were a sustainable waste diversion company. But ultimately we handle the logistics of getting food to people in need. One of the things that you decide to do is from the get go is that you're going to be a technology company that actually because this is a logistics challenge you have to build a robust technology platform to deal with logistics.
If anyone like knows about UPS, they don't think of themselves as a package delivery company, they think of themselves as a logistics company, right? Like the logistics, like I think a one point UPS had drivers make fewer left turns and that just like save them, you know, millions of dollars a year just by that one little hack.
And so that's what's going to be a logistics company that happens to be delivering food to people in need, but you had to build a platform for it. So how did you start? What did you even, how did you even begin to do that? Well, I started hanging out around Georgia Tech. Yeah. And I entered into a hackathon as a team of one and it literally started drawing out the wire frames of this is what I think the first screen is going to look like these are going to be the users.
I would take advantage of everything guy, you know, any office hours when, you know, companies are big dev agencies were like on beach from a in between a big project and they were offering office hours, I would go. I would get my friends to kind of come and be my team because I'm a solo founder, but come and help me take notes and and go with this. And I ultimately started entering pitch competitions and use that prize money to get the first version of the platform to market.
So that's really how it happened. And I ultimately ended up meeting someone at a co working space that was an actual engineer who was like, hey, I'll help you build this on the side.
And we use an outsource dev agency plus him that was kind of like my product manager, but also still a. And engineer himself to get that first version built and that is what I started using to sell the customers, but prior to that it literally was a clickable prototype that I got built at that hackathon near Georgia text campus that I use for almost a year to talk to clients about what this was going to do.
And I was just really honest with customers and saying like, hey, you would be my first customer in this market or you would be my first corporate cafeteria, my first airport and getting them kind of excited about this idea of like we can in hunger together. So the idea was that they would have the customer would have this app and they could like enter what they have available into the into the app and then click go and then delivery truck or pick up truck would come and take it.
Yeah, I mean, I almost look at it almost as like a reverse like Uber Eats or Instacart where we would inventory everything it is at the business sell so all their food and food items.
We make it really easy now you know our technologies gotten so much more intuitive where they can upload their full menu and a matter of seconds and now they click on the items I have 100 chicken sandwiches, you know 200 chicken pizzas and then they would push requests pick up and what our platform would do is calculate two things the estimated weight value of all those items as well as the tax value of all of those items at time of donation.
And then once they requested to pick up we deploy a driver depending on how much food they're picking up it could be a vehicle or it could be a truck cargo and it really just depends how much food we're recovering. We get that food picked up and then we deliver really close that's kind of our our big secret sauce right we're not going to go from San Francisco to Palo Alto all this time passing you know hundreds of nonprofits in the in the distance.
So we keep the food really close we get it delivered to the nonprofit they sign for it like they would a UPS package the driver takes a picture of the donation that signature now generates for our clients a donation letter a record of everything that was donated and then a sustainability dashboard that converts how many pounds of food they kept out of landfill to what that means for CO 2 emissions that they've helped to prevent as well.
So that's pretty much the into in how that portion of the business works. Let me understand the business model so essentially you go to a client right and you say you're paying somebody to take away this food surplus food anyway why don't you pay us and then we'll take it and we will distribute it to nonprofits who will then make sure the people who need the food are fed.
Exactly and we charge like almost like a waste company so a waste company waste management republic services whichever they are charging based on volume how often they're coming out. Sometimes how many bins they're picking up and so that is really the way that we looked at it as well but our price is based on which vehicle because a car is definitely cheaper than sending out a tractor trailer so we have customers that pay for a number of pickups per month for them.
So they're either paying for eight pickups 12 pickups 20 or 30 pickups on a monthly basis that they can use whenever they have access food. And I guess the difference between you and a waste management services that they were they're just going to pick it up and dump it you guys are going to pick it up give it to nonprofits and then hand them a slip with their donation credit so they can actually.
Exactly right it up so it's almost like a rebate like they they might pay you X $100 a month but they might get a $25 rebate from the donation tax credit. It's even bigger than that we typically see a 4 to 10 X ROI so if they're paying us a thousand dollars a month they are typically donating $4,000 worth of food on a monthly basis.
So that and you know honestly guy that was what I thought most companies would want to do it for like hey you want to feed people you want to get the tax deductions but honestly the tides have changed and now everyone is concerned about ESG's and sustainability and every company in America now has a sustainability department.
I could tell you five years ago that wasn't the case I met with a really big company that just became a client of gooders and they they were one of those ones that were like oh we can never work with you because you're not a nonprofit.
And I will tell you this year they sent a message to our general sales inbox right when I was the CEO graveling at their foot four years ago and said hey like you guys have all these employees you have a hundred thousand employees you've got all these cafeterias like let us get the food and get it donated.
And they literally wrote to us and it said we are trying to get a handle on our food waste problem I'd love to talk to somebody about getting this setup that is what's happened now when I was talking about this four and five years ago no one was talking about sustainability no one was this this idea of climate change and it seemed real we also didn't have a pandemic where we witnessed millions of people experiencing hunger that had never been hungry before.
And so the mindset has changed and this matters this matters to people people care about not wasting food and making sure that their neighbors have access to food. We're going to take another short break but in just a moment we'll have more from good or CEO and founder Jasmine Crow Houston on helping businesses waste less food and feed more people stay with us I'm Guy Ross and listening to how I built this lab.
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Member FDIC terms apply Angie's list is now Angie and we've heard a lot of theories about why I thought it was an eco move for your words paper. It was so you could say it faster. No, it's to be more iconic must be a tech thing but those aren't quite right. It's because now you can compare up front prices, book a service instantly and even get your project handled from start to finish.
It's easy. It is and it makes us so much more than just a list get started at Angie dot com that's Angie eye or download the app today. Welcome back to how I built this lab I'm Guy Ross and my guest is Jasmine Crow Houston founder and CEO of good. I mean you really created a logistics company a technology company. In addition to being a service provider right because you have clients I mean they're people who need you know they're nonprofits are your sense of your clients they need this food.
I mean I just try to get my head around all the challenges you have to face I mean you had to build a network of trucks and bands presumably to pick this food up. In addition to building the tech stack to tell me a little bit about I don't know about that about the transportation side of this. Yeah it was that was the craziest thing that we we ever built because it was it was almost a marketplace right guy because on one side where we have all this food.
We've got to match it with all these nonprofits and now we got to handle the logistics of drivers right to match with with the food and the nonprofits.
And so when I first started I was you know spending all my time in light Uber driver and lift driver Facebook groups and I was trying to recruit all these Uber and lift drivers and and then I thought I need to just partner with some of these logistics companies that are already out there like your Ubers and your lifts and your door dashes and your roadies and have them you know get the pickup request and they go and pick up the food and I pay them and so that was like a smart thing that I finally was able to make happen in 2009.
But at first you know the first year and a half we were only operating in Atlanta. We were using kind of owner operators people who had their own vehicles that could go and pick up the food and then we were paying them per pickup. So basically you guys are kind of subcontracting to these to these other companies and that's how you're able to scale it up. Exactly and that's how we could turn on any city in a matter of days you know we really spent a lot of time building out thousands of not.
And a network that can receive this food at any given moment and being really smart like we have hundreds of churches and thousands of shelters. But we also have senior homes so we spent a lot of time building that network and really building community and letting people know that we cared about them. And that was what really was the differentiating fact between us and a waste company. We really focused on being like part of the community.
How do you deal with I mean obviously we talked about how so much of this food is perfectly good food. The quality is still good. It's just you know it might be I drink milk and everything past expiration dates all the time. It's perfect safe. We all do it. But how do you make sure that once you get it then it's handed off to the nonprofits that it's still going to because eventually it's going to go bad. So how do you manage the safety of the food?
Yeah, you know the safety matters every it matters by county. That's the one of the things that we learned early on. So we spent a lot of time understanding how long food lives in Broward County versus Dave County in Florida versus you know Cobb County in Fulton County in Georgia because every health department is different.
So we moved the food really fast. We also require that all of our nonprofit partners have a pretty solid agreement in place with us. They have to be able to store the food so having access to freezers and refrigerators. And we also have a whole nonprofits team that works closely with our nonprofits. Make sure that they're able to receive the food if they have any issues they let us know.
And luckily in five years we've only ever had one nonprofit that said hey we got some food that just doesn't look good and we were able to get that food picked up and then we were able to compost it. I thought about these things really early before I had any customers. I was building this nonprofit network. I was doing the R&D on how long the food lives. And then we're really intentional with how we communicate that message to our clients.
As you sort of grow right and I know you've got other I mean their store like good or branded stores that are my churches right where people can just go in and there's looks like a regular convenience store and it's you can go in free. It's free. But in terms of building a company that's not only sustainable but profitable to do you have to rely ultimately on other revenue sources or can you can you make it happen purely with the fees that you get from picking up the surplus foods.
Yeah we can 100% make it happen on our surplus food on our way stream business. I think when we started building these these good or grocery stores and our pop up markets. A lot of that was during the pandemic because as you can imagine guy all of our customers you know enterprise corporate cafeterias college campuses stadiums and arenas they were closed.
How are we going to stay in business and the main thing that we were focusing on is like how do we make sure that people have access to food and so we started being really creative and bringing on some strategic partners like the NBA like you know state farm. You know different football players basketball players that that wanted to work with us to address food insecurity in this different realm.
We did prove to be a good source of revenue for us for a couple of years. But we really started to really hone in on on how we started last year which was on the surplus food and how do we get this food out of landfill and as businesses started to go back and it's still you know up and down everyone's not back in the office there's still a lot of excess food that we're capturing just because the capacity of the office isn't at 100%.
So we're seeing a lot of that as well. But yeah we we really believe that we're going to scale nationwide and soon internationally strictly with this model because it's working the multiples are great. It's the churn is so low because who wants to say like hey I don't care about feeding people anymore let's let's keep putting our food and landfill. And so once customers get started with us they really love it.
So we started this idea and originally it came from these meals that you were making for people for four years and you were really connected to to unhoused people and people who really were food insecure. Now of course you've scaled this up. Do you have any I mean you had so much person to person interaction with people directly affected and impacted by what you do. Do you still have that? Do you still get that?
Not to this not to the level when I used to be feeding people on the streets is definitely different. You know because that was it was just so personal like when you cook a meal and serve it to someone and see them. Enjoy it and you know tell you like oh this is amazing you should run for president one day like that level of enjoyment. You know I do miss that we I do spend a lot of time still chatting with our nonprofits and you know going to visit them and.
You know making sure that they're good so I get that part of it but the the people you know like being able to go to an actual person is not the same as well as it was when I was feeding on the streets. But I think I expected that as I grew I think our our impact is so much greater you know when I was feeding three to 500 people every other week when I was feeding on the streets now I could be you know providing three to 500 meals with every delivery.
In doing you know thousands of deliveries on a on a monthly and daily basis. Yeah tell me about about the plans going forward I mean you've got obviously this you know you you are in how many cities now are you in? We're in about 34 cities right now. Wow wow 34 cities and presumably plans to grow even more in 2023. Huge plans to grow in 2023 I mean I would I think I always tell the team like hey 34 cities is great 34 states is better with multiple cities and every single one of those states.
So I think we're really trying to expand I'll be honest with you guys there's still some some legislation that prevents us from going to certain cities so we're waiting for things like that to get better. But on the positive side there's states like California New York and New Jersey that are introducing legislation that makes it illegal for businesses to throw away their food they have to recycle it or donate it so that's the hope that we're going to start you know expanding there.
Plus we've got some really big partnerships you'll see a lot of that like the expansion with our current customers. Sadexo magic we have a great partnership in place with magic johnson's joint venture with Sadexo is so rolling out across all their locations so I think it's really about expansion now which is really why we raise some money to hire more team and to be able to grow our footprint.
You went into this and and it was inspired by this idea that food insecurity shouldn't should not exist it should not be an issue in the United States because there's more than enough food to feed people but of course like with any problem it's impossible to solve it 100% but how much closer do you think we can get to.
Sort of eliminating food insecurity if all the excess food that is wasted is is redistributed I think we can get really close my goal has always been to reduce food waste by 15% in this country which will provide about 25 million people with food which is that that's crazy right we're saying 1515 not 50 if I can reduce food waste by 15% that would be enough food to feed about 25 million Americans so that's.
That's that's our goal people always say like will you in hunger I don't know if I will in my lifetime this is something that affects one in nine people on the planet so it's a huge undertaking but I want to be able to say because of good or nobody in Atlanta no one in San Francisco no one in New York is hungry because we've created access to food at no cost to millions of people and that I mean that is a real thing I think a lot of times it's
hard for people that you know have access to order whatever they want anytime they want is is relates to food to comprehend that there are so many people that don't know where their next mill is coming from and that and they live with these critical choices every single day but we're really trying to to make a dinner that.
And really it sounds like you're convinced this only could have worked as a for profit I believe it would have only worked as a for profit because the efficiencies are just built in forces you when you know that that there's.
Money online is employees in line you've got to make it work you have got to make it work there's no fall back there's no funders there's no donors there's no. Philanthropic direction that requires you to do something in a specific way 100% I mean and I think remembering that that's where I started from makes a lot of sense to people you know people I was like why didn't you become a nonprofit and.
I've heard people that were like all of you were a nonprofit you'd be getting you know billions of dollars in donations and sometimes I look at that right guy I remember looking at like the the donation report from a local food bank and one of the cities that we were in.
And in one year they have like a hundred million dollars in donations you know and I was like wow like that's kind of crazy how much how much money they get and here we are you know trying to do so much with a lot less but it's it's a new model I mean we really are disrupting two industries one this seems really
really going to change the next one and we're really willing to drop it the way that this has always been solved is really you know charity we're donating money to the food bank our our company is going to go and hold up a big check impacts and boxes and and that's what we do and then we're also disrupting the which was, hey, we're gonna send out a truck three times a week. We're gonna fill up your dumpsters with whatever you put in them, and we're gonna go put it in landfill.
And so to think that here we are this company that's saying, there's a better way to do both of these things. We're a disruptor, and I'm proud of that. Yeah, for sure. And I imagine you probably had your fair share of people who are not so kind to you for that reason. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's funny because you talked about my TED talk. And when that first came out, I mean, it was just like, I wasn't even expecting the, I would say the hate, right, or like the negative responses that came from it.
But it happened because I'm sharing my opinion, which is what TED talks are all about, like thought for evoking conversation starters. But people didn't agree. And yeah, I've had a lot of that. Like, you know, she should, you know, stick to feeding people on the streets. And I'm not gonna allow technology to solve hunger. I mean, it's really interesting. Some of the comments that I've seen.
But I've always said, like, why would we not want to use technology to do something like reduce food waste and solve hunger? We can't just only use technology to meet our future husband and wife and to have social network. This is a real opportunity to use technology to do something good. And that's what I'm doing. That's awesome. Of course, there's going to be pushback and there going to be people who are going to say, oh, this should never be a for-profit business.
But I think that to your point, those approaches have been good. They're certainly amazing nonprofit and philanthropic churches and non-profit organizations do great work. But it hasn't, I mean, if the problem hasn't been solved, we have to try everything. Gotta try other things. I love that you said that because that's exactly what I think. Everything that's working now, whether it's food pantry, food banks. As I said in my TED talk, they serve an immense purpose and they're needed.
You know, even with all of those things in existence, though, guy, the facts still remains that people are going to be hungry tonight. So we're not doing enough. And that's what we're trying to do here is do more and use technology to do good. Jasmine, thank you so much. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it. Hey, thanks so much for listening to How I Built This Lab. You can follow How I Built This on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or wherever you're listening right now.
The next episode is available right now, or you can binge all of our episodes at free by subscribing to Wondering Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondering app. If you want to follow us on socials, we're at How I Built This on Twitter and Instagram. This episode was produced by Catherine Cipher with Entity by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Routine Errblui. Our audio engineer was Neil Rouch.
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