Scaling Impact: Goodr shows us how innovation can feed millions

Sep 30

***Watch the Goodr Scaling Impact replay***

“Hunger is not an issue of scarcity, it’s a matter of logistics.” This is a guiding principle for social entrepreneur Jasmine Crowe, the founder and CEO of Goodr – a platform that delivers surplus food to communities around the country, simultaneously helping companies reduce waste, increase their bottom line, and deliver meals to Americans in need. Jasmine was kind enough to sit down with our founder and CEO Sevetri Wilson at a recent Resilia Office Hours event to discuss Goodr’s innovative solution to fighting hunger in the United States, as well as her insights about a broad range of other issues relating to the nonprofit sector and food insecurity.

Jasmine wanted to create an organization that would allow people to “dine with dignity,” which required her to get creative about sourcing surplus food. Every year, billions of pounds of edible food are wasted while tens of millions of Americans go hungry. While there are many organizations working to address this problem, it’s clear that we have a long way to go. And even when people are capable of getting food from pantries and other sources, they often still don’t have access to ingredients that allow them to make full meals. As Jasmine puts it, we’re often talking about “kids who’ve never had a vegetable outside a can or fruit outside a cup.”
She believes “we have to be more forward-thinking about how we solve hunger.” That’s why she led the development of a platform that can address food waste and hunger on a vast scale. Goodr doesn’t just jump from restaurant to restaurant collecting food – it works with major entities like Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, where large and diverse quantities of food can be picked up as efficiently as possible. Goodr provides companies and other organizations with a wide range of incentives to participate: savings through charitable tax donations, waste reduction, and the opportunity to make a real difference in their communities.
Goodr also has the resources to demonstrate effectiveness, such as a secure ledger that tracks donations from pickup to delivery and provides real-time analytics on social and environmental impact. This sort of innovation and accountability provides a model for businesses of any kind (including nonprofits), and it demonstrates why we should never be content with a dysfunctional status quo.

Organizations like Goodr are essential as we address food insecurity in the United States, and Jasmine hopes to catalyze a larger discussion around the issue in the private and public sector. This means companies have to reassess how they approach food waste and community engagement, while local governments adopt waste restriction policies and provide incentives for companies that adhere to them. In the meantime, Goodr will continue its vital work feeding millions of Americans and working toward a world in which hunger is finally history. As Jasmine explains, “Too often, we pacify problems.” We treat hunger as a problem that will never go away, so our attempts to address it reflect this attitude. “With Goodr,” Jasmine continues, “we’re trying to be a permanent solution.”

Here are just a few of Goodr’s partners who are joining the work to bring meals into communities: