Ending Hunger With Technology: How Goodr from SAP.iO Foundry New York is tackling food insecurity
If you were in Atlanta for the big game, you may have seen vans with the distinctive Goodr branding driving around the city. From working with the busiest airport in the world: Hartfield Jackson, to now becoming the ‘Official Food Diversion Partner’ for the game and hosting #GoodrBowl — saving 100,000 pounds of food in a week— Goodr is on a mission to fight hunger with technology.
Goodr’s founder and CEO Jasmine Crowe always had a passion to work with underserved communities. She started Sunday Soul in 2013, serving lovingly cooked meals to 80,000 people experiencing homelessness and hunger in cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, Washington, DC. News of her accomplishment spread fast and by 2016 a video about her work had been viewed over 6 million times. Businesses wanted to get involved and support this wonderful initiative, but Jasmine realized there was no scalable and transparent way to do this.
Jasmine discovered that over 72 million pounds of food is sent to landfills each year, costing the economy $218 billion — even while almost 12% of US households are food insecure. Importantly, financial incentives for businesses to donate food have also been in place for years. Research shows that companies could earn back up to 50% of the value of their donation as tax rebate. Yet there has been no efficient way for companies to track that, and the money has been left on the table. Enter Goodr.
Goodr’s unique SaaS platform and easy to use app allows clients to schedule pickups of surplus food via an easy app-based interface. The app provides a tax-deductible receipt for the value of the donated surplus food. Insured and contracted Goodr ground teams pick up the food and deliver it to nearby food pantries, senior centers and other community serving non-profits. The highly localized model of collection and delivery minimizes food wastage, while the easy UI of the app helps companies keep track of how their contributions have helped their community and their bottom-line.
After diverting over one million pounds of food and serving 940,000 meals — Goodr is going after more. This January, Jasmine joined the SAP.iO Foundry in New York to scale up Goodr’s growth as she plans a national rollout across the US with enterprise customers.
SAP.iO is SAP’s strategic business unit to incubate startup innovation and drive new business models for SAP. The organization stands for small input having an outsized output and represents our belief that small teams (input) can have outsized impact (output). Through the SAP.iO Fund & Foundry we help the next wave of enterprise software innovation build products, find customers and change industries by investing in and accelerating startup innovation.
