HIBT Lab! Goodr: Jasmine Crowe-Houston

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Thirty four 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%, 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, before Jasmine launched Gooder, she was running an agency that helped black celebrities set up charitable organizations. 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 um I think in 2011, around the time that you Minister NBA. Tell me, 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. And I originally had this almost a consultancy where I was helping celebrities really define their giving blueprint, how they were gonna 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 thumb. And you were you were busier during those times of years'cause that's when Charitable giving kinda ramps up around those times of year.

That's when people Tend to care. Yeah. Kids going back to school, let's let's get school supplies. It's Christmas time, let's get gifts to kids. The stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. 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. Any time. during the year. And I think that my my celebrity clients were just really focused on

Playing football, basketball, you know, being hip hop stars, R and 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 gonna be feeding people, uh, you know, come out and join me.

So all right, so you you were driving through the streets of Atlanta And you know Like you see, I'm in the Bay Area and you saw

Without regular food. You posted on Facebook that you wanted to To feed people. And what was the idea that you would just cook a bunch of food And bring it to a location and

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. Um, 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 would you basically would have friends and Whoever wanna be involved, bring food, and you'd serve what like Fifty a hundred people. At a time. Oh no, no, no. I was serving anywhere from three fifty to five hundred people at a time. Yeah, 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 can make in large. Quantities. Yeah, for sure. I got really good at making chicken and making pasta because, of course, before the the food inflation, those were more affordable. Um, but it would be multiple things because that was that was the thing. I wanted to give people an opportunity to just have dignity and choice.

Yeah. 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'cause 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 gonna do fried chicken, I would order the fried chicken from like a grocery store um and pick that up and you know, ask different groups to pitch in like five, ten dollars. I also put a lot of my own money into it as well.

Alright, so you 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 to do something. One hundred percent. 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 they

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 wanna just step back for a second and ask you in general about the the problem of hunger in the US. Um because you've given a TED talk about this and everyone listening should go see it. It's so good. But I was And I guess I shouldn't be amazed because I've been

But Forty percent of the food consumed in the US is thrown away. Every year. Is that true? It's true. And and that equates to about eighty billion pounds of food. Eighty billion pounds of food are thrown away. Thrown away. Just thrown out. So if you can imagine a billion, right, that sounds like a lot.

And then you think eighty billion, I mean this is a lot of food. I mean That what what is it? It's 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 it's m 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 you see the food that's not perfect when it gets to this store. I can't tell you how many truckers uh give us calls all the time because if they're late, say they're sitting on in traffic um 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 eighteen wheelers of probably Twenty pallets. worth the food items that now these truckers are like having to figure out how they're gonna 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. Yes. I mean, we've all experienced that. And 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 what percentage of methane and carbon emissions come from landfills in the US. So it must be m s 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 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. Yeah. on every level. The second

how people are fed, right? So There are I'm I I'm I'm in the Bay area here. has obviously a a a huge, you know, crisis, you know, with unhouse people. And it's shocking when you see it here in a you're in Atlanta, there's also

challenges in cities like Atlanta, New York, Chicago, et cetera. Most people who um who cannot afford food, who who need to be fed. How do they get it? Where where do they get it from? Yeah, there's a lot of different resources. There's certainly churches and synagogues and you know, that are are feeding and having different programs on a 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 an 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. Alright, so while you while you were doing Sunday Soul, what did you start to see That's You

realize was a problem. I mean W were there gaps in in what these other groups and and organizations and agencies were doing that that you saw did I mean did you see it an o opportunity to innovate in a new way? Yeah, there are 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 and one time I talked to the family and I'll and I'll never forget, they were a family of um 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 I mean that really

That stuck to me and and he wanted to know when we were gonna 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 gonna get a good meal. So I saw that. I saw that people were really desperate for food. Ам, сойд, аз we think. make people have access to food, there's still a lot of struggle in that people when they have to make a choice, am I gonna pay for my rent, am I gonna pay for my car payment, am I gonna pay for medicine, or am I gonna 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. And a video of one of my restaurants went viral. I had a fifteen second video on Instagram that was nothing but just little pictures, and they captioned it. Look what this group did for the homeless in Atlanta. Piople started tagging me in the video. And I woke up and there was like all these friend requests. And one of the recurring 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 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 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 an 83-page report on food waste. And I'm reading through this and I'm blown away with how much food goes to waste in this country, thinking about the millions that are hungry and realizing wait, we waste all the food that could feed all the hungry. And it it just was like a aha moment, like, hey, I've gotta connect these two. We're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back more from Jasmine Crow Houston, the founder of Goodr. You're listening to How I Built This Lab, I'm Guy Roz. Stay with us.

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 But we've just been talking about that all this food is wasted. Because most people don't know that. They don't know that forty percent of our food is just ends up throwing 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 in your head. You're thinking Maybe this isn't a food problem.

Yeah. I think that's exactly what it is. And the 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 gonna 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? in 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. And that's really what I thought I could do.

So Basically. you land on this notion, this concept that 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 right 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 and see What they're throwing away and m much of that food is Perfectly safe and consumable.

Right. A hundred percent still till this day, I probably get no less than three to four either emails, tags on social media posts. of people Everyday people. going to a grocery store seeing this perfectly good food that gets thrown out. I remember

Uh one time a lady and and it's it's funny because she she said she actually got in trouble for it, but uh 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 have like a U Haul truck, one of our vans, and I was bl 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 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 twenty to thirty minutes, right? 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 gonna 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 twenty, thirty thousand 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.

Alright, so two thousand seventeen you decide To found Gooder. And the idea is Let me build a a logistics company that essentially can

find and deliver food to people who need it. Um, first of all I think a lot of people will be surprised to to hear that it's a for profits, not a non profit, not a charity. Um so why did you decide to go to go that route rather than than a non profit or charity organization. Yeah, you you know, and you know this about me, right, guy. I knew all about non profits.

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 kinda 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, is 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 gonna come and offer these businesses a sustainable way to deal with their waste. And it's gonna help their community. It's gonna save them money.

both via tax deductions that they're gonna get for donating food that's edible, but also by paying for excess waste pickups that they don't technically need. And they're gonna help their community. They're gonna, it's gonna be good on the environment, they're gonna 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 and also, I mean, if you were a nonprofit

You would be spending ninety five percent of your time fundraising. Raising money. From anyone anywhere. Yeah. All the time. Like I was I would say ninety nine percent of my time fundraising.

And just never knowing You know when the next donation was gonna come, when the next grant was gonna come. It it nonprofits are hard business. Yeah. Yeah.

All right, so you decide to run as a for profit and and the idea was that that essentially companies, restaurants, grocery stores Catering companies are 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 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 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 landfill. We can 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 eat.

One of the things that you decide to do is from the get go is that you're gonna be a technology company that actually because this is a logistics challenge. You have to build a robust technology platform. to deal with the logistics. Like if anyone like 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 like I think at one point UPS had drivers make fewer left turns and it just like saved them, you know B millions of dollars a year just by that one

Little hack. you are a logistics company that happens to be d d delivering food to people in need, but You had to build a platform for it. 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 wireframes of this is what I think the first screen's gonna look like. These are gonna be the users. Um, 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 a in between a big project and they were offering office hours, I would go, um, I would get my friends to kind of come and be my team, because I I'm a solo founder, but come and help me take notes and and go with this. And um I ultimately started entering pitch competitions and used 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's like, Hey, I'll help you build this on the side. And we used an outsourced dev agency plus him that was kind of like my product manager, but also still a uh an engineer himself to get that first version built. And that is what I started using to sell to customers. But prior to that, it 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 gonna 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 a 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 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 and 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 a hundred chicken sandwiches.

you know, 200 chicken pizzas. And then they would push request pickup. 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 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 our our big secret sauce, right? We're not gonna 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 CO2 emissions that they've helped to prevent as well. So that's pretty much the the end to end

how that port 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 that people

Uh 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. 'Cause a a 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, twelve pickups. twenty or thirty pickups on a monthly basis. That they can use whenever they have excess food. And I guess the difference between you and a a a a waste management service is that they were they're just gonna pick it up and dump it.

You guys are gonna pick it up, give it to nonprofits, and then hand them a slip with their donation credit. So they can actually write it off. So they ca it's almost like a rebate. Like they m they might pay you X a hundred dollars a month, but they might get a twenty five dollar rebate from the Donation. A tax credit.

It's even bigger than that. We typically see a four to a 10x ROI. So if they're paying us a thousand dollars a month, they are typically donating four thousand dollars worth of food. Well. On a monthly basis. So that and 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 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 100,000 employees, you've got all these cafeterias, like let us get the food and 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 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 gonna take another short break, but in just a moment we'll have more from Gooder 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, founder and CEO of Goodur. I mean you really c created a logistics company, a technology company.

Um 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 essentially your clients. They need this food. I mean I just try to get my head around all the challenges you had to face. I mean You had to build a a network of trucks and vans, presumably.

To pick this food up. In addition to building the tech stack I don't know about that, about the transportation side of this. Yeah, it was that was the craest thing that we we ever built because it was it was almost a marketplace, right, guy? Cause on one side where we have all this food, we've got to match it with all these nonprofits. And now we gotta 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 like Uber Driver and Lyft Driver Facebook groups. And I was trying to recruit all these Uber and Lyft 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 Lyfts and your DoorDashes and your Rodies, 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 a smart thing that I finally was able to make happen in 2019. Um 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. Um, 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. Yeah. We really focus 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

Um the quality is still good. It's just You know, might be pass I I drink. milk and everything past expiration dates all the time. It's perfectly safe. We all do it. Um 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'cause eventually it's it's gonna go 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 the 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 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 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 and D on how long the food lived. And then we're really intentional with how we communicate that message to our clients. So I as you sort of grow, right? And I know you've got uh other I mean there are store like good or branded stores that that are like churches, right, where people can just go in and there's It looks like a regular convenience store and it's it you can go and free.

It's free. But in terms of building a a company that's not only sustainable but but profitable too. 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 from picking up the the surplus foods.

Yeah, we can one hundred percent make it happen. on our surplus food on our waste stream business. I think when we started building these these gooder 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 gonna 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, um, you know, different football players, basketball players that that wanted to work with us to address food insecurity in this different realm. I mean, it and it did prove to be a good source of revenue for us for a couple of years, but we really started to 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 business has 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 gonna scale. nationwide and soon internationally, strictly with this model because it's working. The multiples are great. It's the churn is so low cause who wants to say like, Hey

I don't care about feeding people anymore. Let's 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 this these meals that you were making for people for four years and you were really connected to to unhouse people and people who really were Food insecure.

Now of course you've 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 this not to the level when I used to be feeding people on the streets is definitely different. Um, 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 I get that part of it, but the the people, you know, like being able to go to an actual person um is not the same as w 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 five hundred people every other week when I was feeding on the streets, now I could be, you know, providing three to five hundred 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 thirty four cities right now. Wow. Wow, thirty four cities and presumably plans to grow

Even more. In twenty twenty three. huge plans to grow in twenty twenty three. I mean I would I I think I always tell the team like hey thirty four cities is great thirty four states is better with multiple cities and every 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 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 the hope that we're gonna 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, um, Sedexo Magic. We have a great partnership in place with Magic Johnson's um joint venture with Sedexo, 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 and 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 But How much closer do you think we can get to

m sort of eliminating food insecurity if All the excess food that is wasted is is redistributed. I think we could get really close. My goal has always been to reduce food waste by fifteen percent of this country, which will provide about twenty five million people with food, which is that that's crazy, right? We're saying fifteen, one five, not fifty. If I can reduce food waste by fifteen percent, that would be enough food to feed about twenty five 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 wanna 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 as it relates to food, to comprehend that there are so many people.

They don't know where their next meal is coming from. And they and they live with these critical choices every single day, but we're really trying to to make a den 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 full as a for profit.

because the efficiencies are just built in. It forces you When you know that That there's Money on the line. There's employees in the line. you've gotta 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

philanthropic direction that requires you to do something in a specific way. A hundred percent. 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 and sometimes I look at that, right? I remember um looking at like the the donation report from a local food bank in one of the cities that we were in. And in one year they had like a hundred million dollars in donations, you know, and and I was like wow, like

That's kinda crazy. How much how much money uh they get and 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 philanthropic, the way that this has always been solved is really, you know, charity. We're we're donating money to the food bank. Our our company is gonna go and hold up a big check and pack some boxes, and and that's what we do. And then we're also disrupting the waste industry. 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 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, it's we're a disruptor and I and I'm proud of that.

Yeah, for sure. And I imagine you've probably has your fair share of of people who are not so kind to you for that reason. Oh yeah. I mean it's it's funny because you talked about my Ted talk Uh, and when that first came out, I mean it was just like the I wasn't even expecting the uh

I would say the hate, right, or are like the negative responses that came from it. But it happened because I'm sharing my my opinion, which is what TED talks are all about. Like Thought provoking conversation starters. Um, 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 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 and have social network. This is a real opportunity to use technology to do something good. And and that's what I'm doing. That's awesome. Of course there's gonna be pushback and there are gonna be people who are gonna

say, Oh, this should never be a a for profit business, but I think that E the to your point. approaches ha have been good. There's certainly amazing nonprofit and philanthropic churches and

And nonprofit organizations do great work, but It hasn't not it it 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 pantries, food banks, As I said in my Tet 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 though 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 and 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 GuyRoz on Twitter and at guy.Roz on Instagram. This episode was produced by Catherine Seifer with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Raptine Erablui. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. Our production team at How I Built This includes Alex Chung, Casey Herman, Carla Esteves, Chris Passini, Elaine Coates, Josh Lash, JC Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, 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. How I built this.

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