Trofi: Making connections for a wasteless future
Winners of the second AirDev Impact Challenge help farmers use food waste from businesses as livestock feed
The next time you head to your local Jamba Juice for a healthy snack, consider that that average 16-ounce cold-pressed juice creates 4.5 pounds of pulp waste, resulting in 175,000 pounds added to landfills each year. This food waste, along with similar food byproduct from restaurants and breweries, can make a tasty snack for livestock, saving both the restaurant and the farmers money while improving environmental sustainability.
For the founding team behind “Trofi” (derived from the Greek word for “food”), this unmet need led to a business opportunity. They determined that an online marketplace could allow restaurants to share their food byproduct offerings with local farmers, helping the two sides to connect and coordinate pickups. The team had a wealth of relevant industry expertise to draw from: working for a state environmental department, leading a nonprofit organization, developing social entrepreneurship solutions, and delivering public speeches on the topic of food waste. Having a technical solution was the missing link.
We were excited to help. This month, AirDev held our second AirDev Impact Challenge, providing a free custom web application to a non-technical founding team with an inspiring story and social impact mission. The Trofi team clearly had an innovative concept and the will and expertise to take it to market, so we were delighted to build the first version of their concept in one week.
We interviewed the Trofi team about their path to entrepreneurship and goals for the platform:
Tell us a bit about your backstory. What aspects of your journey have made you unlikely, or underdog, tech entrepreneurs?
As high school and college students, there’s quite a bit that makes us unlikely tech entrepreneurs. Our team first met in high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Math and were united when we saw a common, but critical problem around us: food waste.
Along the way, we’ve struggled to balance academics and entrepreneurship. Whether we were speaking to farmers, making phone calls, or meeting with stores, everything had to be fit into a school schedule. Furthermore, as young entrepreneurs, we don’t have the large personal networks that typically come with age, and while we do have some technical experience, we also don’t consider ourselves as technically-focused people.
But because of our youth, we do have one strength — flexibility — that enables us to adapt to the ever-changing setbacks faced by entrepreneurs. To reach this point, we’ve squeezed meetings in whenever possible, sought out any sources of information, and reached out to experienced mentors for advice. So what we lack in traditional experience, we make up for in resolve, flexibility, and resilience.
What inspired you to pursue Trofi? What problem are you trying to solve with your concept, and for whom?
Our team stumbled into the problem by walking down the street to the buzzing Jamba Juice, just a few minutes away from our school. With such a high demand for their juices and smoothies, we noticed that the employees often threw away a painfully large heaping of pulp per drink. Out of curiosity, we conducted some research about the organic waste produced by juice stores and found that a standard 16 ounce of cold pressed juice yields 4.5 pounds of pulp waste which contributes to the astonishing 175,000 pounds of pulp waste that ends up in landfills each year.
From here, we were inspired to find solutions to reduce or repurpose this form of food waste, as well as all forms of food byproducts including brewer’s grain, whey, food scraps, etc. When looking into food recovery practices, we found that while composting and fuel conversion are certainly useful in some cases, delivering food scraps to animals was more efficient, cheaper, and most importantly, highly underutilized. As owners of livestock, local farmers were the logical recipients of such food waste, so we took the next steps to help turn waste from facilities into a hidden gem for farmers. Trofi unites these two markets, benefiting local businesses, farmers, and the environment.
How do you feel your experience has uniquely prepared you to tackle this problem?
Because of our perseverance, knowledge, and wealth of industry experience, our team is uniquely positioned to push Trofi’s waste management strategy to a global scale. Two of our members, Megan and Vincent, have experience leading a sustainability-driven nonprofit, called the Student Environmental Education Coalition. Our CEO, Vincent, has also worked within the state government’s environmental department and delivered public speeches on environmentalism. Meanwhile, Navami and Michelle, the two remaining members of Trofi, have tremendous experience in business strategy and management. Combined, they’ve launched a startup in the past, learned about entrepreneurship strategy through an incubator program at MIT, and taken entrepreneurship classes under experienced investors and venture capitalists at the North Carolina School of Science and Math.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced as non-technical founders? What options were you considering when getting started?
As non-technical founders working to create an online marketplace platform, it’s certainly been an uphill battle. Because we initially lacked the experience to quickly build a complex online platform, we first focused on developing our business strategy and reaching out to potential suppliers and buyers to bring them on board. Yet we still inevitably needed a platform, so we began working on our Minimum Viable Product (MVP) via Wordpress. Because of the high learning curve and our lack of experience, developing such a complex platform from scratch was a slow process that could have taken months to finish. Thankfully, we shortly thereafter discovered the AirDev Impact Challenge. After building our platform in just a week, AirDev helped us launch our MVP, bringing us one crucial step closer to benefiting farmers and facilities across the nation.
What has been the most exciting part of your journey? What has been the most frustrating?
When we first realized that our idea could actually service people and make our community more sustainable, we were ecstatic. As student entrepreneurs, we were looking for a way to make a tangible difference in the world by building a lasting company that could grow and evolve with the changing times. As the internet brings connectivity to the world, we wanted to create an efficient, convenient platform with a network of food waste producers and animal owners. Having an MVP out there has really been a major step forward for us, so becoming the winner of the AirDev Impact Challenge has definitely been one of the best parts for us!
With entrepreneurship, however, it’s a constant battle of two steps forward and one step back. For example, when we first began, we looked into juice stores as our initial market, but what we discovered was that because facilities such as breweries were better established and produced larger quantities of grain, it made more sense to target them as preliminary customers. Even though it was necessary, making that pivot for us was quite frustrating because of all the work we had already done with juice stores. Although we’re currently starting with breweries, we’d still like to bring in those juice stores as well later on. Overall, though, we’ve gotten much better at dealing with those moments and learning from our mistakes; in the end, the satisfaction of making progress always outweighs the frustrations.
How do you see Trofi evolving over time? What might your app and company look like 5 years from now?
Perhaps the most important advantage about Trofi is its flexibility; as a tool that connects food waste to farmers, Trofi makes repurposing virtually any form of edible waste is possible. That’s why although we’re currently targeting breweries as an initial market, we’ve been looking into a number of new markets as well. We’ve recently been looking into adding food processing plants, cideries, creameries, and even grocery stores that are looking to repurpose food byproducts as an animal feed.
As Trofi gains traction amongst early users (breweries and farmers), we’ll begin to incorporate more types of facilities and provide farmers with a diverse range of options. In addition to being easy-to-use, Trofi provides facilities with a cheaper alternative to paying for trash or composting services. Because it’s so nutritious and cheap, there’s also a massive demand for these types of products amongst both small and large-scale farmers. That’s why we hope Trofi will evolve to attract more and more users around the nation and even the world. After spreading the web application as far as possible, we’ll incorporate a mobile version of Trofi as well to further facilitate these transactions. Five years from now, and further into the future, Trofi will serve as the go-to tool for repurposing all types of food waste, making connections for a wasteless future.
For more insights from the AirDev team, check out our blog at airdev.co/blog. AirDev’s mission is to make custom software accessible to everyone. We offer fixed prices & timelines, money-back guarantees, and unparalleled speed and flexibility — all with the aim of bringing great ideas to life.
