Fighting hunger and food waste with technology company Copia

Project DASH is our initiative to fight hunger and reduce waste by powering deliveries of donated food to hunger relief nonprofits. Since launching in early 2018, we’ve facilitated over 8,000 Project DASH deliveries, totaling more than 500,000 pounds of food.

A Dasher delivers donated food to Recovery Café, an addiction recovery community center in San Jose, California.

This is made possible through our partnerships with food rescue platforms, which are used by restaurants and other businesses to post donations of surplus food and have them matched with nearby nonprofits.

Today, we’re proud to highlight one of our food rescue partners: Copia. This for-profit technology company helps businesses across the country reduce food waste and feed their communities.

Copia’s app lets businesses donate, track, and predict their food waste.

When Copia launched in 2016, it recruited and managed its own network of drivers, which limited its ability to scale. It needed a trusted partner and wider logistics network to rapidly service new geographies and national accounts. In March 2018, DoorDash and Copia engineers worked together to integrate Copia’s platform with DoorDash’s Drive API, so that Dashers across the country could be requested directly through Copia’s system.

Thanks to our partnership, Copia is not only able to scale faster but also able to dedicate more focus to user-testing and refining its innovative waste tracking software which is included in its subscription-based service. Copia customers use its app to track and prevent food waste through detailed predictive analytics. When food excess occurs, the same platform is used to request a donation pick-up, fulfilled by a Dasher. The donation is matched to a nonprofit that needs that exact type and amount of food.

“As Copia scales rapidly across the country, a value-aligned partner like DoorDash helps us achieve our mission to dramatically reduce food waste and solve the World’s Dumbest Problem — hunger.” ~Komal Ahmad, CEO of Copia

Copia’s San Francisco-based team is inspired to implement a business-driven solution to a critical issue.

In less than ten months, DoorDash Drive enabled Copia to rapidly scale its operations to 11 new cities and connect 250,000 pounds of high-quality food to people facing hunger. Today, seventy percent of Copia’s deliveries are powered by DoorDash.

Are you interested in working with Copia and DoorDash? Email projectdash@doordash.com and we’ll connect you.