Replate

The resources, support, and amplification associated with being an Elevate Prize recipient will help me take my organization - Replate -  to the next level. We are currently solving the dual and interconnected challenges of food insecurity and climate change. Replate’s operating model is a great example of how multi-stakeholder engagement, corporate citizenship, community engagement, and technology can protect the planet and nourish communities. We match and move surplus food from businesses to nonprofits (B2B) and individuals (B2C). Since 2016, we’ve recovered 3 million lbs of perfectly edible and nutritious food. This translates to 2.5 million meals that we have brought to non-profits and individuals in need of food assistance. Collectively, we have saved 811 million gallons of water and 6 million lbs. of CO2. 

Replate has identified a critical gap in the food supply chain and created a tech solution that powers our ability to quickly and efficiently match surplus with need. We are excited by the immense potential for our operating model to be replicable across various sectors and countries including in-organic and organic waste of all types that can be recycled or upcycled. We need the connections, amplification, and mentorship that Elevate offers to help us get there.

As the founder and CEO of Replate, I would like to become a role model being a custodian of the planet, driving citizen engagement, and nurturing humanity. I am a first-generation Syrian immigrant living and working in the Bay Area. Food insecurity is close to my heart because of the values my mother instilled in me. I grew up in a culture where cooking food was for more than just you and your family, we always cooked more than what we ate and shared it with neighbors. When I moved to the U.S. to study medicine at UC Berkeley, I observed that this culture didn’t exist and people were going hungry despite the incredible abundance of food. Food waste and food insecurity shouldn’t exist together. It is a logistics problem that is solvable. Last-mile food delivery companies are replete but they do not cater to everyone, especially those most in need of food. And so I launched Replate. I am excited to scale our technology to feed the millions of people who experience food insecurity daily.

Replate aspires to create a world that doesn’t expire. We use technology to match surplus (food, organic and inorganic materials) with demand. Currently, our seamless and efficient infrastructure moves surplus food from businesses to nonprofits (B2B) and individuals (B2C) in major cities like San Francisco and New York and internationally at major events like Dubai Expo.

 Companies sign-up to donate food on our web-based platform. Replate’s Food Rescuers are then dispatched to the donation pickup location and matched to a nearby recipient agency that can accept the food. The matches are created by a patented algorithm that is connected to an internal database to ensure that all food can be picked up and donated efficiently.  We have a paid fleet of on-demand and last-mile Food Rescuers/drivers to perform food rescue reliably and respectfully. In addition to traditional fundraising, our fee-for-service model allows us to be able to pay our Food Rescuers and continuously improve our technology.

 Our goal is to scale this technology to all major urban cities in the U.S. and beyond to help deliver nutritious food to people while simultaneously combating the harmful environmental effects of wasted food in landfills.

How Replate works: https://youtu.be/68KFIO64KXQ

Replate is leveraging technology to solve a problem in a way that no other organization in the food industry is. While doing so, we are not reinventing the wheel and leveraging the API of other organizations, and creating new technology only where we see a gap. Our platform provides a simple, cost-saving solution to our clients’ food waste problem. It is also easily replicable in any city that has a high supply and demand for surplus food. Our innovation is transferable to any other industry that generates a surplus that is not absolved due to inefficient mapping to need or other logistical challenges. Even though our current challenge in food, our work is positioned to solve many supply chain problems.   

We go out of our way to work with nonprofit organizations that are often overlooked and proactively helping people get out of poverty, violence, and homelessness (such as job training centers, youth centers, arts organizations, community programs, etc) rather than only serving reactive organizations that receive more assistance by other means (such as soup kitchens, religious meal programs, homeless shelters.)

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, 42 million Americans experienced food insecurity. Now, that number has increased due to the millions of newly unemployed Americans, school shutdowns, and many social assistance programs being closed or reduced. The people affected by food insecurity are not just people who are experiencing homelessness, but it includes teachers, essential workers, senior citizens, college students, children, artists, and more. Food insecurity affects the health and livelihood of the people in our community and is often an invisible barrier to living a full life. 

Meanwhile, millions of pounds of edible food are wasted every year. This food ends up in landfills and creates harmful methane gas that is contributing to our changing climate. Project Drawdown recently rated reducing food waste as the #1 way to combat climate change. Much of the food we waste is edible, nutritious, and additionally wastes the precious resources that went into producing the food. 

One of the problems lies in the distribution and redistribution of food. There is a lack of infrastructure to connect the food to people who can absorb it. Replate’s technology bridges the gaps between edible surplus food and the folks who can consume it.

Our organization aims to serve the 50+ million people who are experiencing food insecurity in the US daily, and simultaneously combat sources of edible surplus food going to waste. Our food donations go to partnered nonprofit agencies for redistribution and individual homes referred by partnered agencies. During the pandemic, we launched a new service called Replate Home that brought food directly to households. In 2021,  will have served 114 households with a total of 384 household members that have received direct at-home donations since its launch in April 2020.  We will also bring food to 480 organizations. Since we rely on our partners to serve the meals we rescue to communities in need, we do not directly count the number of unique individuals served.  This tracking is challenging even for our partners as it conflicts with maintaining the dignity and privacy of individuals relying on food assistance. 

Since Replate began in 2016, we’ve recovered over 3 million pounds of food, creating 2.5 million meals. Over the next 12 months, we expect to rescue 4 million lbs of food or  3.3 million meals served.

Replate aims to create a system where waste is eliminated, all people have access to nutritious meals, and we live within the means of our planet. We’ve established a platform that facilitates the repurposing of edible, surplus food, distributing it directly to those in communities facing food insecurity. Our algorithms maximize the value of food by matching donors with the most beneficial nonprofits; increase efficiency through our dispatch and task process, and track impact metrics for our partners.

Replate supports state, national, and global sustainability efforts. In California, we assist businesses in compliance with Senate Bill 1383, which requires food generators to reduce edible food waste through donations. We have similar opportunities in New York, where food recovery laws are enacted. Internationally, Replate is working towards several UNSDG goals, including 2.1 “End hunger and increase access to food;” 12.3 “Reduce global food waste..;” and 13.3 “Improve awareness on climate change….,” and will be the food rescue partner for the Dubai Expo. We measure progress through data capture that tracks pounds rescued, water saved, and emissions reduced; we create monthly reports reviewing donations and people served; and set quarterly goals. 

Overall, we hope to accelerate our efforts and scale globally.

Replate is unlike many nonprofits in the food security space, as we operate like a tech startup. Our matching algorithm bridges the food surplus and demand gap efficiently, and our donation platform creates ease of use and inclusivity. We’re able to achieve these results by recruiting top-level engineers and data scientists. However, as an NGO, securing and retaining such talent can be challenging due to our inability to match market compensation. This discrepancy is amplified by the fact that our engineers carry greater responsibility within our small team than typical recruits in this field. 

Replate has goals of scaling nationally and internationally with systems that are replicable and adaptable. Data scientists and engineers comprise more than 40% of our team, an uncommon structure among similar organizations. While we consider this a strength, it is challenging when it comes to securing traditional financial support. Additionally, we face the hurdle of misperceptions around food donations. Many prospective donors lack understanding of the mechanisms that make food donations safe and purposeful, as well as economically beneficial. Our goal is to make replating/rescuing surplus a norm.

The Elevate Prize would enable us to recruit talent to grow and market our company, and secure more business, as we work on growing our earned income model.

Despite recent attention to food waste, there aren’t many modalities through which businesses can allocate surplus food to a mission-driven team on the ground, and track its impact across the community in real-time. Replate empowers people, decision-makers, and food generators to play an active role in preserving the planet and nurturing communities.  

In the U.S., food rescue is dominated by large food banks and food banking organizations such as Feeding America that work to fulfill needs on a larger scale. Individuals volunteer and donate to these efforts, but the active civic engagement, behavior change, and social responsibility needed to have transformative change are absent. 

Replate seeks to inspire, create accountability and remove the stigma associated with “food waste”. We’ve used technology and infrastructure to establish a business model that can be adopted by others, and through our social media and advocacy, we’re able to engage and inform the public on how food rescue is important in the fight against hunger and climate change. We give context to the role of markets and people in creating solutions and aim to be activists, not simply entrepreneurs. 

An endorsement from MIT will help us build awareness of our work around the world.

We see the bigger picture of why we’re here every day: to enable the most efficient food rescue around the world.  We take the time to understand ourselves, our coworkers, and our clients to share our vision and work honestly, always giving us room to improve. 

We’re unafraid to be different in how we achieve our most far-reaching goals because doing things differently is in our DNA.  We are doers constantly striving to create and perfect new solutions to old problems. We achieve this way of working by intentionally weaving DEI initiatives in our recruitment and operations. These initiatives extend beyond addressing race and discrimination. We sponsor work permits in the U.S. for successful candidates who want to join Replate. Our board is not selected based on the fundraising obligations they can meet, rather the richness of ideas and perspectives they bring to the table. Our data scientists actively work to remove bias from our food matching process and algorithm to make sure there is equitable distribution of food to agencies that are typically underserved and overlooked. We support organizations that are proactively helping people get out of poverty, violence, and homelessness (such as job training centers, youth centers, arts organizations, community programs, etc) rather than only serving reactive organizations that receive more assistance by other means (such as soup kitchens, religious meal programs, homeless shelters.)  

We are also acutely aware of negative stereotypes and perceptions around food rescue and delivery. We ensure that our frontline staff, our drivers who are the face of the organization, are provided with Replate merchandise and branded clothing so that they can drive change in their communities with dignity and pride.

Growing up in Syria, I was encouraged by my mother to help our neighbors who were struggling to put a meal on the table.  I moved to the U.S. to study medicine, beginning with molecular and cell biology and later public health and innovation. These experiences shaped my understanding of problems at the micro-level and at a macro level. They helped inform my approach to the problem of food waste as a solvable challenge that both individuals and groups can tackle, while also advocating for food insecure populations as a systemic issue.

While I found a penchant for big ideas grounded in reality and empathy, I sought a co-leader to guide us from a more pragmatic approach. Our COO Katie’s commitment to diligence, organization, and management, as well as her insider perspective on the industry’s culture of waste, balances our team. We also brought in a Lead Software Engineer and Product Manager who had experience across various company types. Their decade of skills combined have produced the first truly efficient food recovery technology to date, and along with our energetic and passionate team, we’ve managed to bring our program to major corporations across the country. 

This year brought the unexpected challenges of COVID-19 and its many repercussions. Many of our clients had to deal with the closure of offices, catering, venues, and campuses, meaning our main source of earned income was vanishing. Similarly, our recipients couldn't receive food as shelters and soup kitchens couldn’t open due to fear of infections. While some may have understandably panicked, at Replate, we sought solutions.

Since Replate’s inception, we have managed our budget economically, spending only what was essential to operational needs despite extra funding, which provided us with a cushion. Additionally, I realized Replate’s biggest asset was our people, so I asked our team to work collaboratively across departments and rethink our client base. We explored new markets like grocery stores and delivered directly to homes to support those in need. Some of our donor partners even began placing orders at restaurants for us to distribute to recipients, thereby supporting both local restaurants and people experiencing food insecurity. 

All year I have been humbled by the resiliency of community members and partners in adapting to changing circumstances. I’m proud to say that no one on our team was furloughed, in fact, we promoted to staff and hired more.

Replate was featured in a podcast by social media influencer Kristy Drutman (Instagram:@browngirl_green; 55K followers) The podcast was titled Stopping Food Waste: From Plate to Planet. The podcast can be accessed on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4NreqTdjZvOgxvaNN2njEN. This episode of Brown Girl Green covers the issue of food waste - which currently contributes to 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions (our world in data). Maen Mahfoud talked about how Replate is redistributing food surplus out to the communities who need it the most. 

NBC Bay Area - July 20, 2017

Daily Cal - July 25, 2017

Stop Food Waste Day - May 22, 2018

Broke Ass Stuart - July 13, 2018

Sentient Media - September 2018

Vine.io - January 2019

Vungle - April 2020

Cisco - May 2020

Cisco (with video) - September 2020 

Replate's ultimate goal is to scale internationally. We've established operations across the U.S., where we can facilitate food recovery no matter where it's requested. Replate employs the principles of circular economics as a basis for our work. We believe constant growth is not the end goal, but a sustainable, regenerative society where we maximize the utilization of resources for the greater good of all. Through our work, we counter food insecurity and waste, while also mitigating climate change. We are tech-driven and income-generating unlike other non-profit organizations in the food systems sector.  The financial support from Elevate will allow us to hire our tech team and help support our operations in the coming months while alleviating the burden for myself and the team to fundraise. 

Aside from much-needed financial support, the Elevate platform will give us the opportunity to gain visibility and inspire more action and change around the world.  

We partner with Doordash, Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, and Food Connect to contract out food rescuers who are reimbursed directly by Replate. We are also proud to serve inspiring and impactful organizations like the Berkeley Food Network, Covenant House, Project Homeless Connect, Asian Women’s Shelter, Bowery Mission, Project Rousseau, and the Glide Foundation. Our food donor partners include Netflix, Amazon, San Francisco Produce Market, Dig, Slack, UCSF, UC Berkeley,  and Aramark. This summer, we will be expanding service into California's Central Valley communities and begin rescuing food from dining centers in San Francisco International Airport.