Goodr Wants to Stop Food Waste

Goodr is a two-year-old startup that provides restaurants, airports, convention centers and other foodservice operations with a blockchain-based digital platform to track surplus food and with 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, as reported on Forbes.com 

Jasmine Crowe's, founder of Atlanta-based startup Goodr, rallying cry to its business clients is “wasted food is wasted money.” But beyond saving money, if foodservice operations are going to get serious about food waste, the logistics need to come with the offer. She told Forbes, the hardest part was running the operations behind all of the pickups and deliveries. Crowd-sourced logistics were the answer. Crowe needed delivery capacity she could flex up and down with delivery volume so that she wasn’t paying for any unused capacity.

Crowd-sourced logistics services such as Goodr partners Roadie and Truxx are a growing part of the gig economy. They function similar to Uber with a gig worker agreeing to pick up and deliver for a set rate.  

Roadie’s model focuses on targeting drivers who are already near a pickup and likely heading in the right direction for the delivery. Truxx is focused on larger vehicles for larger loads.

A year ago, Crowe told Forbes that she didn’t know how Goodr would expand beyond Atlanta. Truck leases, hiring drivers and planning routes on top of navigating local laws regarding food recovery was a heavy lift in unfamiliar territory. But with the cooperation of her crowd-sourced logistics delivery partners, Goodr is operating in Portland, Ore., Los Angeles, Chicago and Raleigh, N.C. And that’s just the start.