On Stop Food Waste Day 2022, Katie Hotze of Grocery Shopii, Jasmine Crowe of Goodr, and Emily Malina of Spoiler Alert share how they're making a difference.
CHARLOTTE, N.C., May 23, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Stop Food Waste Day, a global annual event held the last Wednesday in April, isn't just a one-day concern for Katie Hotze, Jasmine Crowe, Emily Malina, and other food-tech entrepreneurs. As female leaders in a male-dominated tech world, Hotze (CEO of Charlotte-based Grocery Shopii), Crowe (CEO of Atlanta-based Goodr), and Malina (President of Boston-based Spoiler Alert) are working every day to create and refine digital tools to help eliminate food waste.
At Grocery Shopii, Hotze and her team are helping grocery stores curb food waste and improve sustainability through the company's digital meal-planning platform. The platform can highlight for grocery shoppers — through delicious recipes, social media posts, and more — a particular ingredient, instantly bolstering sales and reducing the chance that unsold food will wind up in a landfill.
"Recently, a farmer in Oklahoma found himself with too many freshly harvested leeks that needed to move — fast," Hotze said. "The farmer reached out to the produce buyer at Reasor's Foods, a Tulsa-based supermarket chain that uses Grocery Shopii's technology to power its online shopping platform. Reasor's sourced an amazing leek recipe, added it to their online platform, and blasted out the link through their social media channels. The farmer's leeks? All sold out in no time."
Crowe founded Goodr with a mission to "feed more and waste less." And it's working. In 2021, Goodr served 2,149,192 meals to people in need through its food recovery and popup grocery markets, and it diverted 1,133,654 lbs of food from landfills. A new initiative is helping companies get to zero waste by composting non-edible foods or turning them into animal feed.
Crowe, who cites Michelle Obama as someone whose leadership and resilience she admires as a woman of color, said she is optimistic that businesses are taking steps to end wasteful practices, often at the urging of digital-native employees.
"What I love about this younger generation is that they are socially conscious and use social media as an important tool," Crowe said.
Tech is also central to Spoiler Alert, which Malina and Ricky Ashenfelter formed in 2015 with a mission to eliminate waste. By using data to help blue-chip companies like Nestlé, Kraft Heinz, Campbell Soup, and Danone make better use of excess inventory, Spoiler Alert was able to help customers transact more than 230 million pounds of food last year that otherwise would have been wasted.
"Food can be hard to manage at scale due to shelf life and many logistical challenges. Introducing technology allows for inventory decisions to be made more quickly and waste to be avoided in many situations," Malina said. "There is incredible opportunity to expand that and to reap greater benefits for food businesses, communities, and the planet."
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ABOUT GROCERY SHOPII
Incubated in 2019 and launched in May 2020, Grocery Shopii is a simple, subscription-based integrative solution for small and mid-sized grocers. By offering meal planning options alongside the shopping journey, Grocery Shopii empowers small grocers who lack access to competitive resources while inspiring healthier families by connecting people with real food. Founded by digital marketer and working mom Katie Hotze as a direct response to Hotze's own dissatisfaction with online grocery shopping, Grocery Shopii provides real solutions for busy families seeking to integrate meal planning into the shopping experience. While the greater retail industry has grown complacent to the fact that only 30 percent of grocery shoppers actually check out online, Grocery Shopii combats cart abandonment with machine learning, using recipe and thoughtful automation to expedite meal planning and online grocery shopping to five minutes or less. Grocery Shopii is totally free to shoppers. For more information on Grocery Shopii and its upcoming expansions, visit groceryshopii.com.
ABOUT SPOILER ALERT
Spoiler Alert is a Boston-based software company helping perishable CPG brands manage excess and slow-moving inventory. Spoiler Alert offers a best-in-class B2B sales platform that enables food & beverage brands to manage their liquidation processes across a private network of discount retailers and nonprofit channels - with a heavy focus on maximizing value recovery, strengthening customer relationships, and increasing the effectiveness of supply chain managers.
ABOUT GOODR
Goodr is a food waste management and hunger relief company that leverages technology and its nationwide logistics network to combat hunger and reduce food waste. Goodr's food waste services operate nationwide and include surplus food recovery, organics recycling, and holistic waste management. Goodr provides hunger relief solutions via popup grocery stores, Goodr grocery stores, grocery delivery and student snackpacks to support food insecure communities around the US. Goodr is built on the principle that food insecurity is not an issue of scarcity; it's a matter of logistics. For more information on Goodr, visit Goodr.co.
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SOURCE Grocery Shopii, Spoiler Alert, Goodr
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