My First 100 Days at Afresh

Our mission is huge; our solution is real

When you start a new job, the same principles apply. You meet new people, learn about the business, and figure out your place in the organization. You settle in to make progress, find a way to have impact, and start considering the hard challenges that lay ahead.

At most companies, once the pure excitement of novelty wears off and you’ve gelled with your team, it’s easy to slip into the day-to-day and just make do. But at a company with a mission like Afresh, every day brings a reminder of the immediacy and importance of our work. This counteracts any stagnation that could occur from settling into a day-to-day routine.

Our mission is huge; our solution is real; it is up to us to make it a huge success. If our business is a huge success, we will have reduced food waste enormously, prevented a staggering amount of greenhouse gas emissions, and helped people all over the world access fresh, nutritious food. To have that kind of mission as the bedrock of your day-to-day work makes even the hardest day worth it.

What drew me to Afresh

The minute I read the recruiting email from Afresh, I was hooked. I was fortunate to have worked previously for a company with a strong environmental-focused mission that had a product and business model completely supporting that mission. When I saw what Afresh was on a mission to do and how they were doing it, I knew it was the place for me.

I love the fact that we are solving today’s biggest problem (food waste) and using today’s technology (AI) to do it. I also love that our product supports an industry that we all depend on — grocery stores. We help produce managers do their jobs more efficiently so they can focus on improving the customer experience.

Setting the tone

The first quarter of 2022 will set the tone for the year; a lot is riding on the engineering team to build a foundation for success in years beyond.

We have two important priorities aimed at increasing our product’s impact and shifting our model for integrations and support to let us scale up fast and reliably. In the first quarter, we will get a sense of how these priorities will take shape over the course of the year — not planning them all out meticulously, but understanding their potential trajectory.

While the team focuses on those priorities, I’ll be geared up on hiring. We plan to bring on about 50% more engineers in the first quarter, and it is important to me that we have a welcoming environment for everyone who joins us. My focus will be on making sure the team is set up for success as we bring on so many new people; we’ll have high-quality onboarding, processes that scale, and continuous improvement habits that stick.

What we’re working on

Fresh departments in grocery stores have been starved of technology for decades. Plus, the need for better inventory management has increased as our eating habits have evolved and omni-channel shopping has skyrocketed. At Afresh, we’re building a mission-critical system that produce managers rely on every day to ensure their stores are well-stocked with fresh food that won’t go to waste.

It’s exhilarating to be able to share this groundbreaking technology to help them predict, optimize, and plan their business. Still, our end-users are not necessarily technology power users, so we have the additional challenge of packaging complex algorithmic work in a delightful and easy-to-use application. Right now, the systems most fresh teams use are manual, legacy, or shoehorned to fit in fresh rather than built for it.

At the core of our challenges for this year is the theme of scale. Each grocery store chain manages their data differently, so as we onboard more partners we know we’ll receive messy data from more new sources. Consistently honing our core product is essential to scaling to new partners and categories, because the better our recommendations are, the larger our impact can be. To scale our solutions skillfully, we’ll explore new techniques in data modeling and algorithmic research.

And on top of that, we will 10x the number of stores we support, 3x the engineering team, and add several new products to our portfolio. It’s important for us to fortify our strong foundation so that all of the new growth can be on stable ground.

What we’re looking for

The root trait that everyone at Afresh needs is a desire to do real good in the world, and a direct connection to our mission helps tenfold. We have an incredibly eager team that is highly motivated by our mission, and the people here display an earnest desire to support each other.

On top of that, it’s important for everyone at Afresh to point out potential problems, ask questions to understand historical context, and design solutions that solve for our mission. The natural outcome of approaching our work like this is an ever-evolving and always-improving team.

We are building a company to last. We have to, because our mission is both huge and critical. I want everyone who joins to plan to stay for many years and think of a job at Afresh as an investment in their career, as well as their future.

The best teams I’ve been a part of have left me with relationships for a lifetime — some of my closest friends today I have worked with three times before, dating all the way back to my first job out of college. I want the team at Afresh to have that kind of experience — working on something that matters with people who challenge you to grow.

Working together, apart

Even though we’ve been working remotely since March 2020, the practice still feels relatively new to many of us. We have a couple nodes of gravity on the west coast and in the central time zone, but we know that great engineers live everywhere so we’re hiring in more locations, too.

I have confidence that as we grow a more distributed team we will develop our collaboration practices, because we have four strong values to guide us — candor, kindness, humility, and proactivity. We will look to other companies that have built distributed teams, and we will figure out what works well for us. And when it’s safely possible, we will get people together in person to form, storm, and norm.