Phood

Luc Dang serves as the Chief Executive Officer at Phood, the world’s fastest growing AI food waste prevention company. He started Phood 5 years ago after identifying that 40% of food produced in the United States is wasted.  He left New York City’s finance industry to help tackle food waste across the globe, with a focus on corporate sustainability. Luc has been awarded and recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 as a leader in Sustainability, featured and quoted in the Huffington Post, Boston Globe, Cheddar, and spoken as a sustainability speaker at international conferences about the growing challenges of food waste. He is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Masschallenge, the world’s largest startup accelerator; an Alumni-in-Residence at Techstars, the leading startup accelerator helping entrepreneurs succeed; as well as one of the founding members of the Connecticut Small Business Development Center’s Board of Advisors. 

If the greenhouse gas emissions from food waste were a nation, they would only trail China and the US. However, it is the most addressable cause of global warming. Phood’s goal is to make reducing food waste at a commercial level not just feasible, but profitable. 

Our camera recognition software makes tracking waste as easy as placing food on a scale, but the data collected allows us to feed actionable insights to purchasing managers and menu planners that reduce a customer’s food waste by as much as 50% in the first year of service equating to 30 tons of greenhouse gases on average.

With funding to scale our software to thousands of commercial food businesses, Phood can utilize source reduction (the EPA’s #1 preferred method) to fundamentally change how industries view their waste reduction goals. We are a cure for food waste, not simply another treatment. 

In the US, roughly $218 Billion is spent growing, processing, transporting, and disposing of food that consumers never eat. Roughly 42% of that waste occurs at commercial food businesses. Some businesses are aware of these statistics, yet fail to address the issue outside of composting. Why is this?

You cannot make changes without “defining your problem”. Through discovery, we found the hurdles for food businesses trying to measure and reduce their waste have been the time it takes staff to record what’s thrown away and how to use those log books to then alter production in an impactful way. Our solution addresses both pain points.

At a larger scale, the quest for food waste reduction addresses both global warming and food insecurity. Food waste accounts for 6% of the world’s greenhouse emissions while 1 in 9 American households are food insecure. This is an irrational system and it has required massive overhead for businesses to take action, until now. Our solution reduces greenhouse emissions while opening up resources in the supply chain to be distributed to those in need, all while turning a massive profit for businesses.

Phood’s waste tracking device is a food scale outfitted with AI technology. 

Phood has been awarded the Healthy Communities Grant Program by the EPA. We create tangible change for the continuum of underserved communities across our operational footprint. We amplify the donation rates of our customers by working directly with them on source reduction, while curbing hunger for their local communities. Our focus is to serve our customers by helping them waste less food and reduce  carbon footprints, while empowering them to take action on ensuring equitable distribution of leftover food and healthier planet for us all to inhabit.

Phood elevates how wasted food is creating a plethora of problems that our planet faces today. Current levels of food waste continue to create unsustainable supply chains, enable food overproduction, intensify GHG emissions, and accelerate catastrophic climate change, to name just a few. By helping our customers transform their operations, Phood is rewiring the global food supply chain while tackling the most pressing global issues and preserving the future of our planet. 

Globally, more than ⅓ of all the food we produce is never eaten. 40% of the food produced in the United States is wasted while food cost remains the single largest line on food businesses’ profit and loss statements. While most food businesses target composting or food recovery, the EPA outlines the #1 benefit economically, environmentally, and socially; as source reduction over diversion. 

Phood began with that in mind. Starting in 2015, Phood began surveys following the EPA’s food recovery hierarchy with several medium to large public and private higher education institutions. After several months of data collection using Phood’s waste tracking software, we identified and provided actionable insights to help save these institutions make changes to purchasing and production to save  tens of thousands of dollars in cost savings.

Humanity must come together to educate one another and halt unsustainable practices that are making our collective future bleaker every day. Food waste is one of the most targetable, yet overlooked, problems that businesses globally partake in. What gets us out of bed every day is knowing that Phood’s optimization of food supply chain workflows around the world will combat our planet’s current demise, while addressing humanitarian crises like hunger.

Our founding team hails from diverse industry backgrounds with over 50 years of experience in culinary/foodservice, AI software development, and business operations. Luc Dang, our Chief Executive Officer, has served as a United Nations ambassador for sustainability and is Forbes 30 under 30 for social entrepreneurship. Naim Busek, our Chief Technology Officer, was previously Head of Operations at Amazon Prime Air and comes from an extensive background of community advocacy. Phood was started out of the necessity of finding a solution to food waste that prioritized source reduction over diversion. As outlined by the EPA’s Food Recovery Hierarchy, this provides the most benefits economically, environmentally, and socially. 

While Phood has overcome adversity since inception, the most apt example happens to be the most recent. 

Food waste thrives on uncertainty and the inability to predict or forecast demand. COVID19 changed the world in a relatively short period of time, hitting the foodservice industry particularly hard. Phood worked to quickly leap into action by launching Phood for Frontlines, an initiative to help organizations rapidly expand operations to accommodate increased demand for donation and distribution outlets, as well as food donations. We leveraged a partnership with MEANS Database to help connect food producers to a network of more than 3,000 food recovery partners across the United States.

Luc has been recognized by Forbes 30 Under 30 as a world leader in business and sustainability for his commitment to food waste prevention. In addition, he has been an active Founding Member of the Board of Advisors for Connecticut’s Small Business Development Center where he brings his expertise in building business to help early-stage entrepreneurs succeed. Luc is also the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at MassChallenge, the world’s largest startup accelerator and an Alumni-in-Residence for Techstars Farm to Fork, a food tech accelerator program for high-growth startups. 

Phood is a food waste prevention platform that helps food businesses cut their waste in half, reducing food costs by 8-10%, and alleviating tracking labor by up to 90%. We use computer vision to quickly identify food items and artificial intelligence to provide data-driven insights on not just what is being wasted, but more importantly, why. Our prioritization of source reduction over waste diversion works toward permanent rectification of the problems plaguing our world today at the root-level, rather than simply addressing the “symptoms” and consequences of unsustainable processes.

Our work in food waste reduction will have a domino effect on the way our society operates as a unit. Our work in source reduction will help create a more sustainable global supply chain and foster humanity’s gravitation towards a circular economy, while our elevated understanding of food waste leads customers to increase their donations by up to 30%.

Phood acknowledges that market education is an important adoption curve but we are confident that funding will lead to new customer leads and industry comprehension, inevitably creating exponential demand for source reduction-centric strategies that combat food waste. We are on the cusp of transforming the global commercial food market through the only environmental initiative that has a direct profit incentive undergirding it.

There is no way to put a cap on the number of people that our sustainable practices will help. Our growing operational footprint currently services local communities via Whole Foods stores located throughout the states of Massachusetts (Dedham, Hingham, Westford), Connecticut (West Hartford), and Rhode Island (Cranston). We will be expanding into additional Whole Foods locations across Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska within the next year. We expect our disruptive vision to enable a greater number of people around the world to enact a more sustainable future for our planet and service larger volumes of underserved communities.

Our goals for the next year center around growing our customer base across our core service markets, including food retail, restaurant, grocery, higher education, corporate cafeterias, hospitality, and healthcare. Phood is focusing on growing our brand awareness by forming new partnerships and onboarding clientele that will help create tangible results for a more sustainable future. We will continue capitalizing on driving social good by working directly with underserved communities through our customer and partner channels.

Our goals within the next five years will gravitate around growing current accounts, expanding into international markets, and making source reduction the starting point of every conversation about food waste in the commercial space. One of our biggest action items will be to execute on our national rollout with Whole Foods, while we continue securing new service contracts to spread our mission and sustainability-first value proposition globally. We will also be looking to leverage our computer vision to monitor food safety along the entire supply chain to more efficiently achieve quality assurance for consumers.

Phood has experienced very positive and robust market reception to our value proposition. Our mission statement has resonated with food businesses of all profiles and it is clear that food waste is a recognized problem, with no current and comprehensive solution to addressing this corrosive problem. 

Financial barriers are the only inhibiting factors that are holding us back deploying across markets at greater speed. Financial funding will help combat the setbacks we experience due to our startup profile, while simultaneously expediting our already potent market traction via Whole Foods as our product suite continues to siphon mind-share and wallet-share from our competitors. 

Any financing will be entirely dedicated to scaling the software infrastructure through increased development resources and a robust marketing campaign that will educate prospects about the two-pronged (environmental and fiscal) value proposition of source reduction.

We are confident that we will be able to quickly execute on our market strategy with financial funding today, while continuing to scale our account volume long-term as we capitalize on any newfound momentum to continue signing new contracts.

We are currently raising a seed round from venture capital investors to help finance our growth.

Our most impactful partnership right now is with MEANS database, a non profit food rescue platform that is connected with roughly 6,000 diverters across 48 states. Even a fully optimized operation will still have some level of waste to ensure that their stock is never empty for customers who demand a particular item. Through our partnership with MEANS, we connect customers with food banks, composters, and anaerobic digesters to ensure that even the small amounts of waste are still being diverted in the most impactful way available in their geographic area.

Phood operates as a Software-as-a-Service business model with a hardware component that leverages subscriptions to generate recurring revenue streams. We sell the hardware with pricing optionality for organizations that can’t take on the overhead of paying for the device up front. Our self-sustaining model allows customers to eliminate manual waste tracking and make their money back within the first year of service, through savings on both food purchasing and labor reductions.

Phood has been bootstrapped since inception and is currently seeking venture investment via a seed round to help accelerate our short-term growth. We expect our growing account base to enable us to quickly become financially self-sufficient within the next 1-2 years. Phood currently generates $100K in ARR with total FY2020 revenue forecasted at $250K. 

Phood has raised $100,000 from Techstars in the form of a convertible note.

Phood is currently seeking to raise a $1.2M seed round from both VCs and angel investors.

We are applying for the Elevate Prize so that we may overcome the financial hurdles that are currently slowing down our go-to-market strategy. With funding from the Elevate Prize, Phood is confident that we can quickly service the food businesses and underserved communities in our pipeline, while increasing our market exposure to generate new service opportunities.

Phood is seeking to win the Elevate Prize to secure growth funding and continue increasing our service profile via media and market exposure. We believe that the funding will allow us to capture greater market share and further enhance our brand value, allowing us to close on a wide array of strategic channel partnerships.

Phood has identified a multitude of organizations that would make incredible channel partners. All of the potential partners share the qualities of a shared vision for a circular economy focused on source reduction and a comprehensive book of industry contacts that could raise Phood’s visibility in core markets. This list includes, but is not limited to, organizations like the Ellen Macarthur Foundation and ReFed. A partnership with these organizations would have a two-pronged benefit of connecting us with decision makers in their networks, as well as continually optimizing our solution for maximum environmental impact  as we scale. In return, we can provide anonymized market data on food waste to support their data models and guidelines.