For any food waste recovery business, whether for profit or non-profit, the biggest expense is logistics. Jasmine Crowe, founder of Atlanta-based startup Goodr knew that from the start.
“Originally I thought we were going to be like Uber Eats in reverse… Then I sat back and said that’s not really sustainable,” said Crowe at the AgLanta conference in Atlanta last month.
Goodr is a two-year-old startup that provides restaurants, airports, convention centers and other food service operations with a blockchain-based digital platform to track surplus food and a food waste recovery service. Essentially, Goodr offers insights to help food businesses reduce waste, and then picks up and donates what waste they don’t mitigate.
Several similar platforms have sprung up in the last decade or so as the $270 billion problem of food waste enters the public consciousness and businesses see value in the work of mitigating waste and the halo effect that can follow.
Goodr’s rallying cry to its business clients is “wasted food is wasted money.” But beyond saving money, if food service operations are going to get serious about food waste, the logistics need to come with the offer.
With a “white glove” logistics offering, recruiting big ticket clients like Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and the Georgia World Convention Center weren’t the hard part. Building a user-friendly software platform also wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was running the operations behind all of the pickups and deliveries.
And it wasn’t just hiring carriers to move the food, Crowe needed delivery capacity she could flex up and down with delivery volume so that she wasn’t paying for any unused capacity.