Food Rescue Hero

Note: I am submitting this on behalf of Leah Lizarondo.

Our goal is to scale food rescue operations in 100 cities globally by the year 2030, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Food Rescue Hero would use the Elevate Prize funding and support to rapidly expand our impactful, measurable work to more cities, providing the technology to power food rescue within new and existing food recovery nonprofit organizations in communities around the world. 

We are currently powering food rescue in 12 US and Canadian cities, where our users have redirected more than 50 million pounds of food from the waste stream to people in need. This prize would allow us to take our proven model to more cities more quickly, expanding this sustainable model, rescuing more food, and feeding exponentially more people.

I (Leah Lizarondo) founded Food Rescue Hero as a direct response to a glaring disconnect between hunger and incredible amounts of excess food. I grew up in the Philippines, and when I moved to the United States, I was shocked to discover that while there is a surplus of everything, so much hunger and poverty still exists. We’re better at feeding landfills than we are at feeding people: 40% of the food we produce in the US is thrown away while one in five people are food insecure. 

Many people have visceral reactions to waste and a desire to help. We just needed a way to make a logistical connection between these two problems and give people an easy way to take action. I saw the success of for-profit tech platforms like UberEats, and thought why not apply the same principle to help volunteers redistribute surplus food?

That was the beginning of Food Rescue, a technology platform that harnesses the power of volunteers to help food recovery and hunger organizations scale food recovery. Since we launched in 2016, “Food Rescue Heroes” all over North America have redirected 50 million pounds of perfectly good food from landfills to the people who need it. 

Food Rescue Hero is a food recovery and redistribution technology platform that harnesses surplus food at retail businesses to scale hunger relief. It solves three problems at once: in the United States, more than 1/3 of food is wasted while one in five people currently go hungry and food waste in landfills generates greenhouse gases. Food Rescue Hero’s rapid-response, on-demand logistics model merges technology, civic engagement, and public-private partnerships to revolutionize the transport and distribution of surplus food. 

The app, on iOS and Android, matches available food donations with appropriate nonprofits and coordinates a last-mile transportation network of volunteers. When there is a “match” between a food donation and a nonprofit who would like to receive it, the app alerts nearby volunteers of the available “rescue.” When a rescue is claimed, the app guides the volunteer through every step with built-in navigation, delivery verification, and social media tools.

In five years, Food Rescue Hero’s volunteer users have rescued over 50 million pounds of food. That’s equivalent to 37.5 million meals (enough to feed every person in Texas) that would have been sent to a landfill. We are now scaling food rescue operations in 12 North American cities.

We believe that convenience is a right, and that social service delivery should approach solutions with the same fervor for innovation as commercial services. The technology itself is not innovative - this logistics model has been proven to scale by services like UberEats, Doordash, and Instacart. The difference is that our app mobilizes the largest on-demand volunteer transport network in the world to rescue surplus food and bring it to people in need. 

And our volunteer drivers deliver: across our network, they have completed 200,000 rescues, missing only 1% of available donations, with an average response time of just six minutes. With over 22,000 volunteers, our network is agile and resilient. In traditional trucking models, if a truck breaks down, food pantries that depend on it won’t have a delivery for the day. With Food Rescue Hero, a back-up driver is only a push notification away.

Thirty-five percent of people living below the poverty line don’t have access to a car, and antiquated models of food access that ask them to figure out how to get to a pantry during specific hours just don’t cut it anymore. Food Rescue Hero creates new access points for food, and this year we even introduced a home delivery function to the app.

Our model makes access to healthy food convenient for people in need: a stark contrast from the miles-long lines of cars at food distributions we have all seen during this pandemic. Food Rescue Hero is true human-centered design, making it easy for people to help and easy for people to receive help.

Since launching in 2016, Food Rescue Hero has mobilized the largest network of volunteer drivers in the world. Over 22,000 volunteers have recovered more than 50 million pounds of food that, without this service, would have gone to a landfill to generate methane, a harmful greenhouse gas. 

According to food recipient surveys, 92% of people who receive this recovered food agreed that food rescue helped to make ends meet, and 86% reported an increased access to healthier food. In our pilot city of Pittsburgh, our regular deliveries of small quantities of fresh food have created new food access points within walking distance of 90,000 people. 

Food Rescue Hero currently operates through nonprofit partners in 12 North American cities. Our goal is to scale food recovery in 100 cities across the globe by 2030, in line with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. 

Across all 12 cities using Food Rescue Hero technology to scale food recovery, our volunteers deliver healthy food to one million people annually. Our models indicate that one year from now, at 20 cities, we will have grown the number of nonprofits we partner with to distribute food by approximately 77%. We expect to be serving approximately 1,770,000 people in 2022.

We are one of the few organizations that measure our true impact on food insecurity at the end-user. Using the USDA Food Security Survey, an independent series of surveys by Dr. Catherine Greeno of the School of Social Work at the University of Pittsburgh found that 90% of our food recipients in Pittsburgh report an increase in food security, 92% agreed that food rescue helped to make ends meet and 86% reported increased access to healthier food. We aim to deploy the same survey across all the cities that use our platform to measure the growing impact of food recovery and redistribution to the millions of people we serve.

United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 12.3 is to halve food waste by 2030. In doing so, we directly impact SDGs 2 (Zero Hunger) and 13 (Climate Action - food waste is one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas, and the largest component in landfills). 

Our goal is for Food Rescue Hero to scale food recovery in 100 cities globally by the year 2030. 

After successfully piloting the model in Pittsburgh, the platform is now used by food rescue organizations in 12 metropolitan areas and will grow to at least 20 cities by the end of 2021. 

Network-wide, over 23,000 volunteer drivers receive push notifications of available food rescues and have prevented more than 55 million pounds of food from feeding landfills, diverting the food instead to the hungry. This has mitigated over 30 million pounds of carbon emissions and has impacted hunger for 1 million people in 12 cities.

By 2030, at 100 cities, we project that more than 375,000 volunteers globally will have recovered more than 3.5 billion pounds of food, preventing 1.3 billion pounds of carbon emissions. This equates to the potential to feed 10 million people who are food insecure.

The challenges of hunger and food waste dwarf even the most well-resourced, well-managed NGO. The need has only been exacerbated by the pandemic as the number of those who are food insecure increased from 35 to 50 million in the U.S. alone. This has created increased awareness and demand for the Food Rescue Hero platform. 

To keep us on the path—and ideally, accelerate velocity to respond to the acute need—of supporting 100 cities by 2030, we are seeking an investment of $6 million over the next two years. This supports continued product innovation, increased engineering efficiency in our technology development and providing direct expertise and operations support to other food rescue nonprofits using the platform. This also allows us to fund the platform’s use for food rescue organizations in cities where financial resources may be challenging. 

Our financial model forecasts a need for philanthropic funding to support the organization as we grow our platform license revenue model. Work with the University of Santa Clara’s Global Social Benefit Institute projects a decreasing reliance on philanthropic funding over the next 10 years as we grow our license model with 80% of our operating budget supported by earned revenue by 2030.

Food Rescue Hero is People-Powered Technology. Our approach’s linchpin lies in growing four stakeholders—food rescue nonprofit partners, food donors, nonprofit distribution partners and most importantly, hundreds of thousands of volunteer drivers. The technology we have is a tool but the singular audacious bet that our model has is that PEOPLE WILL STEP UP. And they already are. However, to achieve the goals we have set requires large-scale awareness. Elevate Prize’s platform and audience will be invaluable in amplifying our work and ultimately growing these stakeholder networks. 

We need to raise awareness nationally and across all the cities that use the platform to MOBILIZE the movement. We have shown the scale that is possible in Pittsburgh, where we started, and where food rescue is now part of the city’s zeitgeist, resulting in impact that has ended emergency calls for food across the region’s public housing community. 

Awareness for what we do and how we can reach the most isolated during the pandemic resulted in the highest number of downloads of our app as the world went on lock down, enabling us to continue to serve when many closed down and allowing us to reach the most vulnerable.

Food Rescue Hero was founded by Leah Lizarondo, a first-generation immigrant from the Philippines. Our leadership team is comprised of 55% women and 22% people of color. 

As a woman and person of color, Leah is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion and believes that this is key to true innovation—one that is based on representation.  

Food Rescue Hero’s hiring policies are explicit in this commitment. We employ tools such as screening job descriptions for bias and a selection process that ensures an equitable pool of candidates at every level. These practices have resulted in staff diversity reflective of the city we live in. Our team is culturally, ethnically and linguistically diverse and representative of the communities we serve.

Our philosophy has always been to question the status quo—even after we have set it. Our team’s diverse backgrounds, not only racially and culturally but in terms of work experience—spanning consumer goods, retail, technology, food and consulting—deeply inform our approach to our work. 

We are one of the few technology nonprofits in the world, and one of even fewer that are using technology to mobilize a mass movement. With the challenges we are aiming to solve, we consistently task ourselves to approach our work with the same fervor for innovation that companies who target us with their products have. 

We see the people we serve as customers. Our primary goal is for our service to reach them. To do this, we must at our core, truly embrace human-centered design and each initiative we launch is designed with the people we serve. 

For instance, in social service delivery, we ask why is convenience a privilege? This has allowed us to change how food is accessed by those in need—removing the barriers of transportation and time, and for the first time, allowing the ability to deliver food support to people’s homes in the same way we have Doordash deliver to ours.

The fact that we waste almost half our food supply—enough to feed everyone who is hungry four times over—is a disconnect that I find unacceptable. Especially in the light of the fact that technology and logistics models now exist that can scale retail food delivery.

Inspired by services such as DoorDash, we built the largest, on-demand, volunteer food transport network, based on the audacious assumption that people are wired for good. Our network responds to all available food rescues at a 99% success rate—higher than some commercial food delivery services.

Food Rescue Hero does not fit squarely in comfortable categories. We are a nonprofit. We are a social enterprise. We are a hunger organization. We are climate action. We are a technology company. We are a logistics company. We are a MOVEMENT. 

The work of raising awareness for what we do that cuts across what used to be discrete lines is a challenge of educating our stakeholders, our funders, our networks. To move beyond incrementalism, we must go beyond how we traditionally have approached problems (hunger intervention has not changed meaningfully for over half a century).

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Food Rescue Hero is a proven model providing a local, scalable solution to the global problems of food waste, food insecurity and climate change. The Elevate Prize will significantly accelerate our velocity toward 100 cities globally - and will allow us to reach it before 2030. 

Funding will directly support technology development, build our partner success practice and put resources behind raising awareness for our work. This funding will also allow us to grant the license to NGOs that are less resourced and in countries where funding may not be available.

The Elevate Prize’s platform is invaluable to raising awareness and in turn, further support. We believe that our work embodies the ethos of the Prize and we hope to represent it to the world.

Food Rescue Hero currently provides the technology coordinate food rescues with 12 organizations across the United States and Canada: 412 Food Rescue in Pittsburgh, PA; Philly Food Rescue in Philadelphia, PA; Hunger Network Food Rescue in Cleveland, OH; Food Runners in San Francisco, CA; Prince William Food Rescue in Prince William, VA; Food Finders in Los Angeles, CA; Vancouver Food Runners in Vancouver, CA; Last Mile Food Rescue in Cincinnati, OH; Haven’s Harvest in New Haven, CT; Table to Table in Hasbrouck Heights, NJ; and Northern Virginia Food Rescue in Dumfries, VA.

These nonprofits license our technology to launch and scale food recovery in their regions. 

Across our 12-city network in the US and Canada, we work with approximately 5,000 food retailers who donate food (including national and regional grocers such as Whole Foods, Shop Rite, Kroger) and over 2,700 NGOs (including the Salvation Army, Boys & Girls Clubs and Public Housing Authorities) who distribute food and over 23,000 volunteer drivers.