How I Built This with Guy Raz - Reclaiming food waste with Jasmine Crowe-Houston of Goodr (2022)

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Millions of Americans don’t have enough to eat — a startling fact considering 40% of the food produced in the U.S. gets thrown away. And a lot of that food… from restaurants, supermarkets, office buildings and more… is perfectly safe to eat. What’s worse is that this discarded food waste produces harmful methane emissions that contribute to global climate change.Jasmine Crowe-Houston is an entrepreneur who became obsessed with these problems. In 2017, she founded Goodr, which works with businesses to take unused food and deliver it to those who need it. Instead of paying waste management companies to throw surplus food into landfills, businesses can work with Goodr to deliver that food to local nonprofits that get it to people in need. This week on How I Built This Lab, Jasmine talks with Guy about solving the logistical challenge of delivering surplus food to people experiencing food insecurity. Plus, the two discuss Jasmine’s decision to launch Goodr as a for-profit organization, and the growing corporate focus on sustainability that’s led to Goodr’s rapid growth.This episode was produced by Katherine Sypher and edited by John Isabella, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our audio engineer was Neal Rauch. You can follow HIBT on Twitter & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail] Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special. There are templates, intuitive drag-and-drop editing, and even an AI-enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions. Review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place.

Looking to grow your business? Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing through Squarespace capital. Go to Squarespace.com slash built for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe. All loans subject to credit approval. This show is in partnership with Airbnb. This past summer, I took my family to Vienna, and it was incredible. We spent our days wandering the old streets, stopping for coffee and pastries,

visiting museums, and just soaking up the history of one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And one of the things that made the trip so special was the whole. home we booked on Airbnb. It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place, with all of its personal touches and its amazing location, could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at

Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Okay, on to the show. And this week, we're rerunning 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 Raz. 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 percent, 40 percent 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, before Jasmine launched Gooder, she was running an agency that helped black celebrities set up charitable organizations. And on the side, she'd set up pop-up restaurants and parking lots to serve free food to homeless people in Atlanta, where she lives. That experience would eventually leave Jasmine to start Goder.

You started an organization called Black Celebrity Giving. back, I think in 2011, around the time that you finished your MBA. Tell me about that. What was it? 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. Yeah.

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 kind of 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. 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 can 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 to the streets of Atlanta. And, you know, like you see, I'm in the Bay Area. And you saw and house 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, you know, 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 Five, you know, Aretha Franklin, that was the mixture. And 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 an abandoned parking lot or behind a building. And so you basically would have friends. and whoever want to be involved, bring food. And you'd serve what, like 50, 100 people at a time? Oh, no, no, no. I was serving anywhere from 350 to 500 people at a time. Wow. Yeah, so 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 can 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.

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. It 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.

All right. So you basically decide on your own to basically feed people on the weekends. 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 were hungry. You felt like you needed to do something. 100%. I felt like there were people that were feeding people.

There was a lot of initiatives. But I felt like people were not getting the dignity and choice. that people like you and I have when 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 gooder. I want to just step back for a second to ask you in general about the problem of hunger in the U.S. Because you've given a TED talk about this and everyone listens 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 percent. of the food consumed in the U.S. 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. 80 billion pounds of food. A thrown away. Just thrown out. 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 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. 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. I mean, we saw huge instances of this during the pandemic. You saw those stories of Idaho potato farmers that, you know, how to waste millions of pounds of potatoes because people stopped ordering. So you see that. 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 in traffic because there's a bad accident on the highway and they get to that grocery store, that distribution center late, they can have the whole truck refused. And so now you have 18 wheelers 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. 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 totally insane. I mean, we produce so much food in this country and waste so much food in this country. And so this is a fact. And I don't even know what percentage of methane and carbon emissions come from landfills in the U.S. It 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, broading away, it releases emissions. Exactly. It releases

harmful methane gas emissions. And 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 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 crisis with unhoused people. And it's shocking when you see it. You're in Atlanta. There's also challenges in cities like Atlanta, New York, Chicago, et cetera.

most people 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 that 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's 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 Soul, what did you start to see that you realize it was a problem? I mean, were there gaps in what these other groups and organizations and agencies were doing that that you saw? I mean, did you see? 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 watched 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, that 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, guys, 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. Wow.

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? But 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 4 o'clock in the morning reading a Harvard

business school, their food law policy had done like an 83 page report on food waste. And I'm 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 in realizing weight. We waste all the food that could feed all the hungry. And it just was like an aha moment like, hey, I've got to connect these two. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back more from Jasmine Crow Houston, the founder of Gooder. You're listening to How I Built This Lab.

I'm Guy Raz. Stay with us. Welcome back. I'm Guy Raz. 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, because most people don't know that. They don't know that 40% of our food just ends up thrown away, right? I didn't know it. 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, too, 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 meal is coming 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 and 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 solving it. And that's really what I thought I could do. So basically, you 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, et cetera. 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, opposed of people, everyday people, going to a grocery store, seeing this perfectly good food that gets thrown out. I remember one time a lady, and it's funny because 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 because 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 U-Haul truck, one of our vans. And I was, I mean, 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, guys, is if we go to, if we go to Walmart or we go to a grocery store and we purchase groceries, what if we stop someplace else?

chances are we don't even make it home in 20 to 30 minutes, right? If we get home, 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 $20,000, $30,000 worth of food that we were able to give to these seniors that would have gone to. to waste. And it was perfectly good food. All right. So 2017, you decide to found Gooder. And the idea is, let me build a logistics company that essentially can find and deliver food to people

who need it. First of all, I think a lot of people will be surprised to hear that it's a for-profit. It's not a nonprofit. It's 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 a for-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. to haul 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 waste. 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. They're going to help feed people and that that was a business.

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. I was like, what? And then it started to make real business sense because they were already paying waste companies to throw the food away. Yeah, and also, I mean, if you were a nonprofit, you would be spending 95% of your time fundraising, raising money from anyone, anyone. Oh, all the time. 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 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 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 than putting it in a 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. Like if anyone knows anything 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 at one point UPS had drivers make fewer left turns and it just like save them, you know, millions of dollars a year just by that one little hack. You are 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 wireframe. So 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 or 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 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 used an outsource dev agency plus him that was kind of like my product manager, but also still an engineer himself to get that first version built. And that is what I started using to sell the customers. But prior to that, it's. literally was a clickable prototype that I got built at that hackathon near Georgia Tech's campus that I used 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 or my first airport

and getting them kind of excited about this idea of like we could end hunger together. So the idea was that they would have, the customer would have this. And they could, like, enter what they have available into the app and then click go and then a delivery truck or pickup 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 that the business sells, so all their food items. We make it really easy now.

You know, our technology has gotten so much more intuitive where they can upload their full menu in 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 pickup. And what our platform would do is calculate two things to estimate a 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 a pickup, we deploy a driver, depending on how much food they're picking up. It could be a vehicle or it could be a truck, a cargo van.

It really just depends how much food we're recovering. we get that food picked up, and then we deliver it really close. So that's kind of 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 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 CO2 emissions that they've helped to prevent as well. So that's pretty much the end-to-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 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 from Gooder. 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 excess food.

And I guess the difference between you and a waste management service is that 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 write it up. So it's almost like a rebate. Like they might pay you X $100 a month, but they might get a $25 rebate from the donation, a tax credit. It's even bigger than that. We typically see a four to 10x ROI. So if they're paying us $1,000 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 ESGs 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 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 gravelling at their foot four years ago and said, hey, like, you guys have all these employees. You have 100,000 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 set up. 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 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 CEO and founder Jasmine Crow Houston on helping businesses waste less food and feed more people. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. Welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz and my guest is Jasmine Crow Houston, founder and CEO of Gooder. 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, their nonprofits are essentially your clients. They need this food. I mean, I just trying to get my head around all the challenges you had to face. I mean, you had to build a network of trucks and vans, presumably, to pick this food up. In addition to building the tech stack. Tell me a little bit about, I don't know, about that, about the transportation side of this. Yeah, that was the craziest thing that 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've got to handle the logistics of drivers, right, to match with the food and the nonprofits. And so when I first started, I was, you know, spending all my time in like Uber driver and Lyft driver Facebook groups. And I was trying to recruit all these Uber and Lyft drivers. 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 2019. 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 nonprofits in our 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 different. 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 passing. I drink milk and everything past expiration days all the time and it's perfectly 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 bad. So how do you manage the safety of the food? Yeah, and you know, the safety matters every, it matters by county. That's one of the things that we learned early on. So we've spent a lot of time understanding how long food lives in Broward County versus Dade County in Florida versus, you know, Cobb County and Fulton County in Georgia, because every health department is different. So we move 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 or 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 lived. And then we're really

intentional with how we communicate that message to our clients. So as you sort of grow, right? And I know you've got other, I mean, there are store like good or branded stores that like churches, right, where people can just go in and there's, it looks like a regular convenience store. And it's, you can go. And it's free. It's free. But in terms of building a company that's not only sustainable, but profitable too. Do you have to rely ultimately on other revenue sources? Or 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 waste stream business. I think when we started building 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. And so it was like, 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 and security in this different realm.

I mean, and it 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 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 really believe that we're going to scale nationwide and soon internationally, strictly with this model, because it's working.

The multiples are great. The churn is so low because who wants to say like, hey, I don't care about feeding people anymore. Let's keep putting our food in landfill. And so once customers get started with us, they really love it. All right. When you started this idea out, originally, it came from these meals that you were making for people for 40 years. And you were really connected 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 know, 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? You know, not to the level when I used to be feeding people on the streets is definitely different, you know, because that was. 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 people, you know, like being able to go to an actual person is not the same as it was when I was feeding on the streets.

But I think I expected that as I grew. I think 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 monthly and daily basis. Yeah. Tell me about the plans going forward. I mean, you've got obviously this. You know, 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 2020. I mean, 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 legislation that prevent. 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 are 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,

Sodexo Magic. We have a great partnership. in place with Magic Johnson's joint venture with Sodexo, and 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 it was inspired by this idea that food insecurity 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 redistributed? I think we could get really close. My goal has always been to reduce food waste by 15% of this country, which will provide about 25 million people with food, which is, that's crazy, right. We're saying 15, 15, 15, if I can reduce food waste by 15%, that would be enough food to feed about 25 million Americans. So that's our goal. People always say like, well, you're in hunger. I don't know if I will in my lifetime. This is something that affects one and nine people on the planet. So it's a huge undertaking. But I want to be able to say, because of Gooder, 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 as it relates to food to comprehend that there are so many people that don't know where their next meal is coming from. And they live with these critical choices every single day, but we're really trying to make a dent in that. And really, it sounds like you're convinced this only could have worked as a for-profit. Oh, I believe it. It would have only worked as a for-profit. Because the efficiencies are just built in. It forces you when you know that there's money in the line, there's employees in the line, you've got to make it work. You have got to make it

work. There's no fallback. There's no funders. There's no donors. There's no philanthropies. There's no anthropic direction that requires you to do something in a specific way. 100%. And I mean, and I think remembering that that's where I started from makes a lot of sense to people, you know, because people are always like, why didn't you become a nonprofit? And I've heard people that were like, oh, if you were a nonprofit, you'd be getting, you know, billions of dollars in donations. And sometimes I look at that, right? I remember looking at like the donation report from a local food bank in one of the cities that we were in. And in one year, they had like $100 million in donations, you know, and I was like, wow, like, that's kind of crazy.

How much money they get. And here we are, you know, trying to do so much with a lot less. But it's a new model. I mean, we really are disrupting two industries. One, this seems really philanthropic. The way that this has always been solved is really, you know, charity. We're donating money to the food bank. Our company is going to go and hold up a big check and pack somebody. And that's what we do. And then we're also disrupting the waste industry, which was, hey, we're going to send out a truck three times a week. We're going to fill up your dumpsters with whatever you put in them. And we're going to go put in a 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 the, 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 provoking 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. the streets and I'm not going to 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 are 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. There's certainly amazing nonprofit and philanthropic churches and nonprofit organizations do great work. But it hasn't, I mean, if the problem hasn't been solved, we have to try everything. You've got to 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 pantries, food banks, as I said in my tech talk, they serve an immense purpose and they're needed.

You know, even with all of those things in existence, though, Guy, the fact still remains that people are going to bed 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, ad free by subscribing to Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. If you want to follow us on socials, we're at How I Built This on Twitter and Instagram, and I'm at Guy Raz on Twitter and at guy.org on Instagram. This episode was produced by Catherine Seifer with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Routin Arablui. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Estevez, Chris Messini, Elaine Coates, Josh Lash, J.C. Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson. Our intern is Susanna Brown. Neva Grant is our supervising editor. Beth Donovan is our executive producer.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening. to how I built this.