R/GA Innovation Exchange Spotlight: Meet Jasmine Crowe of Goodr
As part of our Inclusive Innovation series, we interviewed the female founders participating in our 2019 R/GA Innovation Academy with Kinship at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. We spoke with Jasmine Crowe of Goodr about how solving for food waste serves a greater purpose.
The lifecycle of food from restaurants starts where you would think, in a kitchen being prepped by one of the millions of restaurant workers spread across America. That inventory of food then lands in the hands of us, the consumers. Yet what happens to all the excess food and ingredients we don’t purchase or isn’t used? It’s discarded to one of the thousands of landfills in the United States.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), 27% of landfill waste is food, with over 72 billion pounds of food being wasted per year.
Goodr, through their sustainable surplus food management platform, reduces food waste, thus changing the lifecycle of excessive food from restaurants. Jasmine Crowe, the Founder of Goodr, connects reducing food waste with a larger purpose in mind; to end hunger.
“When I started researching food waste, it really got me upset because there’s no need for good food to go to waste when so many people are hungry. I’ve been hungry before. I’ve had friends and family members who’ve experienced hunger. My motivation for Goodr is not necessarily coordinating food waste, but what’s deeply connected with me is ending hunger.”
Featured in her Ted Talk, Jasmine argues that hunger isn’t a scarcity issue but a logistics issue.
“There is more than enough food being produced across the country and there’s so much of it going to waste. I talked to people about why they aren’t donating their surplus foods. Turns out that most times when restaurants had excess food, they needed a quick solution to actually make the donation. Restaurants have limited space in their kitchens and limited amounts of time. They didn’t know who the food would or could go to. Goodr positions ourselves as a food waste management company that is solving that logistics problem of getting this food to people in need by physically moving it for them.”
Every year in the United States, 42 million people are suffering from food insecurity. The current food supply chain ecosystem has failed to solve this problem which has grown this issue into a national epidemic.
Jasmine and her team have diverted over one million pounds of food from landfills, providing over 940K meals to people in need. Goodr operates through a mobile app and an online portal. The app allows for all the food donation inquiries to be connected to their team. he portal is where Goodr allows their customers to visualize data like seeing how many meals are being provided, environmental statistics. a restaurant is wasting the most and tracking pickups.
“We inventory everything that a restaurant sells then created a user experience so that all they have to do at the end of a night is literally click on the items they have to donate, input the quantity, and our platform captures the weight of those items. We handle all the logistics.”
By 2020, Goodr is planning to expand into 20 more cities. They’ll be expanding to Philadelphia, expanding throughout Texas and California, and looking toward the Northeast.
“I just feel compelled to solve this problem and I’m going to continue to work towards it because it’s my job to solve. I get phone calls and emails from people I don’t know that are like, ‘hey do you have any food for me and my family? I’m about to be evicted, and my kids haven’t had food in two days.’ Many times, people have to make a critical decision. Am I going to pay for food today or am I going to pay for my light bill that’s due? What I find is that food is the first to go or you start to eat terrible food because it’s all you can afford.” Those are the problems I’m trying to solve for.”
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This year, R/GA Ventures partnered with Kinship, the newly launched ventures, technology, and business innovation arm of Mars Petcare, rebranding the program the R/GA Innovation Exchange with Kinship. The R/GA Innovation Exchange program extended its marketing and advertising focus to tech startups in the growing sphere of purpose-driven companies that can create positive change on a global or local scale.
To learn more and stay in the know, visit ventures.rga.com/studios or follow @rgaventures on Twitter.
