Reducing Food Waste: Are Traasdahl Of Crisp On How They Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste
An Interview With Martita Mestey
To me, leadership means fostering a shared mission, view of the world, and direction that inspires the entire organization to tackle an important problem. By creating alignment around a shared vision, leaders empower everyone on the team to help get there. As an example, at Crisp we use an OKR framework to translate our mission into an action plan. We break our “big rocks” into smaller pieces that define what we want to achieve and how we will measure progress. Key to this process, and to successful leadership, is transparency and openness. With OKRs, the entire company has access to the same information and knows how their initiatives directly impact our overarching goals.
It has been estimated that each year, more than 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. That equates to more than $160 billion worth of food thrown away each year. At the same time, in many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. The waste of food is not only a waste of money and bad for the environment, but it is also making vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.
Authority Magazine started a new series called “How Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies and Food Companies Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste.” In this interview series, we are talking to leaders and principals of Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies, Food Companies, and any business or nonprofit that is helping to eliminate food waste, about the initiatives they are taking to eliminate or reduce food waste.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Are Traasdahl, founder and CEO of Crisp, a data-sharing platform for the food industry.
Are has more than 20 years of experience in mobile and digital technology. He was the Founder & CEO of Tapad Inc. In 2016, Telenor Group acquired Tapad for $360M, making it the fifth largest venture-backed M&A exit in New York since 2009. Prior to Tapad, he founded Thumbplay, a mobile entertainment service that he grew to more than $100M in revenue in less than 3 years before he exited the company. The company, later acquired by Clear Channel, is now called iHeartRadio.
Traasdahl is a frequent contributor for outlets such as CNBC and Bloomberg News, and he has been featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Ad Age and other major news publications. He was named Global Startup Awards™ Founder of the Year in 2016 and EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2014.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
I was raised in Sør-Trøndelag, a small village of less than 10,000 people in Norway. My family was filled with idealists and activists for both social and environmental causes. I vividly remember my dad in his office writing thousands of letters on behalf of Amnesty International on his typewriter to help address injustices in the world. The path I chose as a tech and business entrepreneur was not necessarily my expected one.
Nevertheless, after moving to the U.S. I came to love entrepreneurship and technology and have been founding and building companies for over 20 years. One of the companies I founded was Tapad, along with my serial technology partner Dag Liodden. Tapad was among a group of companies that modernized advertising toward a programmatic model, using data and automation to help brands deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time. Tapad served 180 of the 200 leading global brands with advanced algorithms and a programmatic data infrastructure for sales and marketing.
In 2016, I was fortunate to sell Tapad as one of the largest venture-backed exits in New York. After the sale, I wanted to take some time off and spend it with my wife and kids, then four and eight years old. We had the privilege of traveling for 14 months to over 30 countries — it was truly the trip of a lifetime. During our travels, I witnessed the staggering imbalance of the food system, and this made a deep impression on me. When we returned to the States, I began meeting with Dag, who also grew up in a Norwegian family deeply passionate about social issues. After hundreds of hours of research and meetings with experts in the industry, we determined that the root cause of food waste is slow-moving, unused data. It became clear that the retail industry was ripe for the same programmatic transformation that we had helped lead in advertising at Tapad. And that’s when we founded Crisp.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company or organization?
The last two years have certainly been interesting and unexpected due to the pandemic. When we started Crisp, we knew that data was critical to building a more resilient, agile supply chain — but we had no idea just how much more relevant these issues would become. COVID dramatically changed consumer behavior and supply chain logistics overnight, and right here at home we saw dramatic food shortages while simultaneously food was being thrown out as restaurants and schools closed. We’re still feeling the ripple effects today, and the supply chain has become a household issue. As a result, the pandemic has influenced Crisp’s product direction and made our work more urgent, while serving as a proof point for how important supply chain transformation really is.
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
To me, leadership means fostering a shared mission, view of the world, and direction that inspires the entire organization to tackle an important problem. By creating alignment around a shared vision, leaders empower everyone on the team to help get there. As an example, at Crisp we use an OKR framework to translate our mission into an action plan. We break our “big rocks” into smaller pieces that define what we want to achieve and how we will measure progress. Key to this process, and to successful leadership, is transparency and openness. With OKRs, the entire company has access to the same information and knows how their initiatives directly impact our overarching goals.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”
Moving from a small village in Norway and then coming to the US, I always felt like the underdog. But I decided that the only way to overcome that was to just work harder than everybody else. So, I would get up at 4 and 5 every morning. I never let that fear get in the way of what I knew I could do if I worked hard enough.
Can you help articulate a few of the main causes of food waste?
When I first began researching food waste, I was astounded to discover that one-third of all retail food is wasted before it even reaches the consumer. This level of waste not only negatively impacts our climate (as the third-highest greenhouse gas emitter behind the U.S. and China), but it also hurts the bottom line for food businesses and makes food more expensive for consumers. Crisp sees that the cause of this waste is a mismatch of supply and demand — meaning there is more product than there is demand in some places and not enough in others. Ultimately, getting those two forces to align takes real-time visibility, but the retail industry is plagued with slow-moving, inaccurate, siloed data that makes it very hard for trading partners in the supply chain to collaborate. Crisp was founded to tackle this very problem.
What are a few of the obstacles that companies and organizations face when it comes to distributing extra or excess food? What can be done to overcome those barriers?
It can be very hard for retailers and brands to identify food waste instances before they occur. As Adam Moleta of Greenleaf Foods, a Crisp customer says, “customers let you know when you’ve lost them — spoilage doesn’t.” It takes a certain level of supply chain transparency and data to see that, for instance, there is a surplus of product nearing its expiration date and it is not likely to sell in time, based on current sales trends. With Crisp, brands have the real-time visibility to spot these situations, so they can proactively take steps to offer that product on promotion, for instance, or donate it to a local organization.
Can you describe a few of the ways that you or your organization are helping to reduce food waste?
Crisp facilitates the free flow of data in real time between retailers, distributors, and suppliers, helping trading partners better match supply with demand and manage the flow of inventory. With clear visibility into sales and inventory data, brands and buyers can improve demand planning and production schedules, streamline logistics, track inventory, and identify products at risk of spoilage.
As one example, we worked with Greenleaf Foods, a plant-based brand, to develop a spoilage tracker. Greenleaf uses Crisp’s spoilage dashboard to track inventory as it moves across the supply chain. If there is excess product or it’s nearing expiration, they can take steps to move the product more quickly or donate it.
Other customers use Crisp data to tighten production cycles and keep inventory lean. Tiffany Perks, founder and CEO of Plant Perks, says, “We use data to reduce food waste by tracking our monthly sales and store counts. This helps us forecast how many ingredients to order at a time to meet demand for the next three months. We order ingredients in three month increments to make sure nothing expires and goes to waste.”
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help address the root of this problem?
In my view, it’s all about collaboration. Food waste is too big of a problem, and our food system is too interconnected, for any one organization on their own to solve this issue. Crisp’s vision for the food supply chain is one in which all parties can collaborate in real time with data to make better decisions and make the entire supply chain more efficient.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food waste? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.
ReFED is an incredible organization that takes a scientific approach to food waste, promoting data and technology as tools to tackle the problem head-on. We’re part of ReFED’s online marketplace that helps retailers, government agencies, and other organizations find tools that can help them measure and actively reduce food waste.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
I feel fortunate to currently be working on a movement that is so critical to our society and environment. Crisp was founded with a double bottom line approach: we’re not only here to succeed in business, but to tackle an important global issue and foster meaningful careers for our team.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)
I would love to meet with Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin. I want to understand how they approached innovation and how they went about creating something completely new that didn’t exist before.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find Crisp at gocrisp.com, and keep track of what we’re doing via our social media and our blog. You can also find me on LinkedIn and on Twitter, where I will continue to share insights and experiences from Crisp.
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
