Read the full transcript of social entrepreneur and CEO of Goodr Jasmine Crowe-Houston in conversation with journalist and “TED Radio Hour” host Manoush Zomorodi, recorded at TEDNext 2024 on October 22, 2024.
The Journey from Peanut Butter Sandwiches to a Food Rescue Empire
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Okay, so I have been following Jasmine’s career. She gave a TED Talk at TED Women five years ago in December, which is crazy. And I interviewed you three years ago and now here you are and so much has happened. Yes, you are more of a behind the scenes person for people who don’t know. Goodr, explain your story, how you came to be so aware of food waste and what you are doing.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: Well, hi everyone. I’m so excited to be back at TED. This is like we have a relationship here. I mean, TEDx, TED Women, TED Radio, TED Next. I mean, I’m going to name my next kid TED.
But you know, I started Goodr here in Atlanta. I had created a pop-up restaurant for people experiencing homelessness. The concept really came to me after feeding and working with a volunteer group and making all these peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, going out to the streets and handing them out and a man telling me, “Oh, I’m allergic to nuts.” And I thought we just made a thousand peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and nuts are one of the number one allergies.
And it made me think that dignity was lost in how we are serving our unhoused and how we’re serving people in need. And that too often we think, well, they’re homeless or they’re hungry, take this and be happy. Forgetting the fact that they can have religious convictions, dietary restrictions or to plain out be allergic.
And so I created this pop-up restaurant where I would rent tables and chairs and linens and print out menus and let people feel like they were dining at a restaurant. And a video went viral and it was a 15 second clip. I’ll never forget it because it was before Instagram allowed you to have minute videos, longer videos.
So I woke up one morning really afraid because I had never obviously gone viral. And I was like, what’s going on on Facebook? I need to get off this app. It was like one of those things. And so I’m reading through millions of views and comments and what people kept asking me was who donated the food?
And the truth was nobody. I was couponing, price matching. I would start cooking on Friday, Saturday, go out and feed about three to 500 people every Sunday. And so I was like, I need to get this food donated. I went to Google fully expecting to get a list of all the businesses that are going to donate food to me to help me keep feeding people. And I would live happily ever after.
And instead I found about food waste. And I read an 86 page report by the Harvard Food Law Policy group. And as I’m reading through this at this point now into the wee hours of the morning, I’m getting upset because I’m thinking about the people that are lined up at 9am for my 3pm feeding every Sunday because they know that there’s not a lot of people that come out to feed during the week.
They were living at the former Metro Atlanta Peachtree Homeless Task Force. It was the only shelter in the city that would allow families to come. And that’s so important. A lot of you all don’t know, but if you are a homeless mother, you have a 15 year old son, you guys got to go to two different shelters.
And so I was feeding all these people, I learned about food waste and I became upset and I was like, I’m going to solve this. I’m going to do something better and Goodr. And that’s what got me started.
How Goodr Works: A Two-Sided Business Model
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So explain what Goodr does now because from going to peanut butter sandwiches, it’s impressive.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: So now we have a two sided business model as it relates to food waste. We can help a business keep all of their food out of landfill if it’s edible. We’re giving it to people in need that are people like me feeding people shelters, safe houses, domestic violence centers, churches. One of our largest partners is communities and schools. We feed thousands of kids every week.
So we keep edible food from going to a landfill and we are delivering it directly to people in need while giving all of our clients back a lot of data. How many pounds they’re keeping out of the landfill. What does this mean for their CO2 emissions and their carbon footprint.
And then we have a hunger side of our business, which was birth during the pandemic that really focuses on creating sustainable solutions to solve hunger. We build free grocery stores inside of schools. We have 28 right now around the country. We have grocery and meal delivery. During the height of the pandemic, Goodr delivered all the meals to Atlanta public school students that got free breakfast and lunch. But we’re learning virtually, so we made sure that they got food at home. So we really are solving hunger and food waste.
The Staggering Reality of Food Waste
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So can you just explain, can we give her. Yeah, the part of me is like 40%. That’s such a crazy statistic.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: That’s a crazy number.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: But why when you talk to the companies, nonprofits, like what is happening that there is so much food available but going nowhere?
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: I mean it’s a startling number if food waste itself was a country, but it’ll be the third largest country in the world. So it’s a lot of food. So you think about that. I mean, between the production, the transportation and the disposal, nearly 2% of all US GDP we spend on food that we never even eat.
And I think what it is is that the old guard is we’ve always done it this way.
We’ve always thrown it away and this is how we do it. And of course, when I was first starting, people were like, oh well, if someone gets sick and we’ll get sued.
And so Goodr said, hey, we’ll take on all of that onus. We provide the packaging materials, we provide the labels. When nonprofits receive the it comes from Goodr, they sign hold harmless agreements. I have a multi million dollar liability insurance because the airport was my first customer. We were driving around Tarmac’s and I ended up having to get insurance that I wasn’t quite ready for. But it definitely helped the business.
And even with all of that, people will still say, well, we’re just afraid or our lawyers just can’t wrap their heads around it. Or we’re just, we’re going to compost everything, even if it’s edible, which I’m still happier that it’s not going into landfill if it gets composted. We deliver to hog farms. We turn, we have anaerobic digesters. We’ll take food too. So we want to keep it out of landfill. But feeding hungry people is not a priority for too many people in this country. And that’s a problem.
Inside Goodr’s Operations
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah. Tomorrow I am coming to see one of your facilities.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: I’m so excited about that. You’re going to love it.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: From what I understand, it’s bread day, so bread is going to be coming in from all different places and then you are going to be sorting it. Some of it goes, as you said, to compost if it’s not for human consumption.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: Or to a hog farm.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Or to a hog farm, which is amazing. Or a cattle farm.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: I think we have cattle farms now too.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yes, you do. I’ve seen that. And then some will go, of course to people, to schools, to hospitals or wherever else. But talk to me more from the corporate side. How did you get people to come on board with this? Like, did something have to change when it comes to laws and forcing companies to do this? Is it because they want to be able to say to their customers, like, we are a sustainable company?
Holding Companies Accountable
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: So what I used to do is I would go to the websites of the big hotel groups, the big food Groups and I would look at their sustainability reports. This is how I got the airport as a customer. And I went to them and I said, hey, 27% of. I’m looking at your waste tonnage and 27% of this, according to the EPA is Food. So you guys wasted 25 million meals. Now, I have no idea if that was true, but I looked at their sustainability report. I used the EPA’s calculation that food was the number one thing in landfill.
And I was able to go back to the Atlanta airport and say, listen, you guys are sitting in College Park. The children in this city are living in poverty, and all this food is going to waste. And this doesn’t make any sense.
And so the airport became one of our first large scale customers. And you think of all of the grab and go food items that goes to waste every single night if it’s not for Goodr. And now that’s why I need to be in more airports. But getting that before it goes to waste and getting it to Gateway center before Georgia workforce, their third shift is coming out and building half of this city. A lot of men that are trying to transition out of homelessness, them getting that meal, putting this food in our grocery stores, and families taking it home for free. This is what it does.
So I think so much it was really about making people keep their promises. I won’t say the hotel group, but they had on their website, and this is someone I’m trying to pitch now. And I was like, hey, you guys said you’re going to cut food waste in half by 2020. This is in two months. Why have you guys not started? What’s the process?
So a lot of times it’s trying to hold companies accountable. It’s about keeping. I mean, people need to keep. I think we live for the announcement and we as people don’t follow up.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Yeah, yeah.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: On the delivery. Right. Because for someone to invest millions, I don’t even know how much a Super bowl commercial cost, but I’ve heard it’s like a million dollars per 30 seconds. I could be wrong. But, two to three million dollars and not follow up on your promise.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: That’s called greenwashing. Yes.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: And that’s a lot of.
Scaling Across the Nation
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: That’s a lot. So you’re not just in Atlanta though, now, you’ve grown a lot. Yes.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: So we are in 15 states, 26 markets. So this is where we have food moving and being donated and then we have grocery stores in about five states, maybe six or seven now. But we are doing our food waste business obviously in more locations.
The Technology Behind the Solution
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So someone was asking me, they’re like, but how do these companies keep track? Because it must be so random what they can get rid of. And I said, well, actually there’s an app for that.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: There is.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: Which at first, when I first heard about your app, I was like, that seems weird, but actually it is really the linchpin in making this work. Right?
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: That’s really what I saw. So when. And shout out to Jackie Chu. She runs TED Atlanta, TEDx Atlanta. And she convinced me to do my first TEDx talk. And when I was talking to her about it, she was like, oh, I get it, it’s a logistics problem. And I was like, you get it? And that’s really what it is.
Hunger is not an issue of scarcity. And we hear about that right there. We need to produce more food, we need to grow more food. We are wasting 40% of it. It’s really about logistics. How do we connect this excess food with the millions of people that need it?
Seniors, their income doesn’t change. We’re going to be seniors, all of us. Some of us probably already are, but all of us, God willing. And once you get to that point, it doesn’t matter then if toilet paper goes up, if bread is more expensive, eggs are more expensive. This is all you have to work with.
So it’s really about how quickly can we match it. So we inventory everything it is that they sell. We create a very easy user experience where they click on the items, tell us how many request a pickup. We leverage the shared economy that’s already out there. And that’s how we’ve been able to grow to a lot of different locations. We don’t have to hire our own drivers, we don’t have to purchase trucks and vehicles. Now we do have a couple. But what we leverage is a driver that’s already out there. And drivers love it. They’re like, oh my God, I’m feeding people, I’m getting paid to do it.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: So literally, like the person, let’s say I’m working at a big company and I work in the cafeteria area. What do I take out my phone and what do I do?
The Technology Behind Food Recovery
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: Or it could go on your point of sale system and you click on the Goodr app, your menu is already there, and you’re just clicking on the items that you have saying, I’ve got 10 chicken breasts. I’ve got this. Our platform is calculating the approximate weight of those items. So we pull a lot of that data from U.S. food, Cisco, whoever they’re ordering their food from, and then it’s calculating the tax value of those items at the time of donation, which is a critical, critical offering to our clients.
And once that food gets picked up, a nonprofit receives it, they sign for it like they would a UPS package. And a donation letter with a picture of that donation from that nonprofit automatically goes to our clients portal. So now they see everything that they’ve donated, the nonprofit it went to, and a tax deduction receipt for what they donated.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: And the carbon that they’ve saved.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: And yeah, we have a corporate social responsibility impact report as well as a sustainability. And it’s actually, I remember one of my angel investors, she sits on the board of IHG, who’s one of Goodr’s customers. And she messaged me last year at their board meeting in London and she was like, Goodr is on the board report. Like they’re literally talking about how we’re cutting food waste with this company.
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: They’re starting to show off. They’re starting to.
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: They’re starting to show. I mean, as they should. Yes. I mean it’s such a good thing.
The Business Model: For-Profit vs. Nonprofit
MANOUSH ZOMORODI: What’s… I mean, we should be clear. You’re not a nonprofit. You are a B corp. Why is that important to you? Why did you decide to go for a for-profit company? Is it because that is something that you hope to scale? Where are the pros and cons of that?
JASMINE CROWE-HOUSTON: There was a couple things. One, I think the nonprofit was going to be a much harder old guard to get past. Because everybody always donates to the food bank. It’s all we ever know. We’ve been doing canned food drive since we were 8. Our kids are still doing it in school now. And I felt like I was going to be spending a lot of time trying to gain respect in the nonprofit space.
The biggest piece that I saw though was that businesses were already paying to throw this food away. So this was not newfound spend. They’re already paying Waste Management, Republic Services, whoever their waste company is. Mind you, the waste industry is a trillion dollar industry. None of us ever say let’s just keep our trash right? Like we were like, is trash day missing? Oh my God, it’s a hurricane. They didn’t run today. Like, what’s happening? Like we are paying for this on a daily basis.
So when I realized that, I realized that this was not going to be newfound spend for these business. It was going to be a better spend. So dollar for dollar, we’re a little bit more expensive. But the outcome, the return on the investment for our clients is far, much greater than they would ever get from a traditional waste company. And so I do look at us as a triple bottom line. We’re for people, we’re for planet, and we are for profit.
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