Reclaiming food waste with Jasmine Crowe-Houston of Goodr (2022)

0:00Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to How I Built This Early Early and Ad Free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcast. This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo, the only CRM built for B2C and the key to making Black Friday and Cyber Monday your biggest wins yet. When the holidays hit, your competition only gets louder. That's why the most successful brands use Klaviyo to cut through the noise and build personalized relationships that drive more revenue. With Klaviyo, you get marketing, service, analytics, and all your customer data together on one AI-powered platform.

0:41It's everything you need to build lasting customer relationships. Send exclusive email offers to your VIP customers. Deliver perfectly timed text to high-intent shoppers. Maximize your ad dollars with precision. Join the more than 176 ,000 brands, including Away, Patrick Ta, and Dollar Shave Club, already growing with Klaviyo. Make this holiday season your best yet at klaviyo.com. AI companies have unique business models, each with distinct billing needs. Stripe is the go-to choice for AI leaders, from early-stage startups to scaled enterprises. Whether it's OpenAI offering tiered plans based on user needs or Cursor implementing flexible billing structures for code access, redefining the future requires sophisticated business models.

1:38With Stripe Billing, you can support any business model from credit-based to sales-negotiated contracts and easily align your monetization strategy with customer value. Join the ranks of 78 % of the Forbes AI 50 and millions of businesses worldwide that trust Stripe to help them build more profitable, scalable businesses. Discover more at Stripe.com. If you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. As a business owner, I get it. My business is and has always been all-consuming since I started it. Every day there is a new decision to make and even the smallest decisions feel massive.

2:23Well, Shopify is a commerce platform that gets what running a small business is like because Shopify was once one too. It's the right platform with all the tools you need to be successful. Shopify. Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash built. Go to shopify.com slash built. Shopify.com slash built.

3:01Okay, on to the show. And this week, we're rerunning an interview from last fall with Jasmine Crow Houston. Her company, Gooder, partners with big companies to make sure their wastes, well, doesn't go to waste. Hope you enjoy. Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. 34 million Americans don't have enough to eat, and several million of them are children. And it doesn't actually make sense when you think about it, because there is more than enough food to provide for everyone every day. In fact, 40%, 40 % of all the food produced in the United States gets thrown away. And a lot of that food is perfectly fine.

3:46But every day, millions of tons of food are thrown out by restaurants, supermarkets, warehouses, catering companies, hotels, and corporations. And many state and local laws make it really difficult to redistribute that food to people in need. And to make matters worse, all that food ends up rotting away in landfills that then produce massive amounts of methane emissions. Jasmine Crow Houston is an entrepreneur who became obsessed with these very problems. In 2017, she founded a company called Goodr, which works with businesses to take unused food and deliver it to those who need it. Now, before Jasmine launched Goodr, she was running an agency that helped black celebrities set up charitable organizations.

4:30And on the side, she'd set up pop-up restaurants and parking lots to serve free food to homeless people in Atlanta, where she lives. That experience would eventually lead Jasmine to start Gooder. You started an organization called Black Celebrity Giving. This was back, I think, in 2011, around the time that you finished your MBA. Tell me about that. What was it? What was the idea behind it? Yeah, I have been a full-time entrepreneur, which is crazy to think about, Guy, for over a decade of my life. And I originally had this almost a consultancy where I was helping celebrities really define their giving blueprint, how they were going to use their star power for good.

5:12And I built hundreds of nonprofits and I would create all their programming, help them do their board training, finding their board members, creating all of their program descriptions and fundraising. And one of the things that started to become a really repeat cycle for me, I realized I was really busy around Thanksgiving, Christmas and back to school. But other than that, the rest of the year, I was pretty much twiddling my thumbs. And you were busy during those times of years because that's when charitable giving kind of ramps up around those times of year? That's when people tend to care. Yeah.

5:51Kids going back to school, let's get school supplies. It's Christmas time, let's get gifts to kids. Stuff like that. Exactly. And one of the days I said to one of my clients, and this is around Thanksgiving one year, and I'll never forget, I said, hey, you know, the people that are standing in line for a turkey in November are also hungry in October. That this was not just a, you're only hungry, you know, two or three times a year, you could find yourself experiencing hunger anytime during the year. And I think that my celebrity clients were just really focused on playing football, basketball, you know, being hip hop stars, R &B legends, and it didn't really stick to them.

6:38And one day I was driving through downtown Atlanta. I drove through an area that was really highly populated with homeless populations. And I thought, you know what, I need to start doing something. And so I went home and I posted on Facebook, I'm starting this initiative called Sunday Soul. Every Sunday I'm going to be feeding people, you know, come out and join me. So, all right. So you were driving to the streets of Atlanta and, you know, like you see, I'm in the Bay Area and you saw unhoused people living in tents and people, you know, without regular food. You posted on Facebook that you wanted to feed people.

7:16And what was the idea that you would just cook a bunch of food and bring it to a location and that was what you would do? Yeah. The idea was that it would be like a good Sunday dinner. like if you go to you know church or you're just relaxing you know whatever it is that you do on a Sunday but you typically have that good Sunday meal that was my idea that I wanted to give people experiencing homelessness dignity and a really good meal and so it was a mixture of like a good soulful dinner and you know old school music so like the Temptations the Jackson 5 you know Aretha Franklin. That was the mixture.

7:55And I would rent tables and chairs and linens and print out these menus that used to just be so funny. But I was letting people feel like they were at a restaurant, even though we were in an abandoned parking lot or behind a building. And so you basically would have friends and whoever wanted to be involved, bring food, and you'd serve what, like 50, 100 people at a time? Oh, no, no, no. I was serving anywhere from 350 to 500 people at a time. Yeah, so it was a big thing. Yeah, I would start doing the shopping on Wednesday and start doing the cooking on Friday for an event that was on Sunday. So it was a pretty big undertaking.

8:35And you would do like pasta, spaghetti, and just things that you can make in large quantities. Yeah, for sure. I got really good at making chicken and making pasta because, of course, before the food inflation, those were more affordable. But it would be multiple things because that was the thing, Guy. I wanted to give people an opportunity to just have dignity and choice. And so we weren't just giving them, hey, here's this peanut butter jelly sandwich. You're hungry. Just take it. So they got a chance to order an appetizer, a salad, an entree, two side items, and then they would get a choice of a dessert as well.

9:12So it was like a real restaurant. And you would just set this up in a parking lot in Atlanta and asking people to donate Because it probably was a lot of money to do that. Oh, yeah. It certainly was a lot of money. And I got smart. You know, I would start to, if I was going to do fried chicken, I would order the fried chicken from like a grocery store and pick that up and, you know, ask different groups to pitch in like$5,$10. I also put a lot of my own money into it as well. All right. So you basically decide on your own to basically feed people on the weekends. And a lot of times you'll see church groups do this or nonprofit groups do this.

9:52And you were just on your own, just thought, you know, there are not enough people feeding people who are hungry. You felt like you needed to do something. 100%. I felt like there were people that were feeding people. There was a lot of initiatives. But I felt like people were not getting the dignity and choice that people like you and I have when we're hungry. It was just like, hey, take this food, you're hungry, have it. And I want it to do better. I want it to essentially, you know, do gooder. I want to just step back for a second and ask you in general about the problem of hunger in the U.S.

10:29because you've given a TED Talk about this and everyone listening should go see it. It's so good. But I was, and I guess I shouldn't be amazed because I've been in this profession, my profession for more than 25 years, but 40 % of the food consumed in the U.S. is thrown away every year. That's what I read. Is that true? It's true. And that equates to about 80 billion pounds of food. 80 billion pounds of food, thrown away. Thrown away. Just thrown out. So if you can imagine a billion, right, that sounds like a lot. And then you think 80 billion, I mean, this is a lot of food. I mean, what is it?

11:03It's not the food that we throw away from our plates. It's like things that the grocery stores and Costco and Kroger throws away. Right? Is that what we're talking about? You know, it's from the farm to the fork, waste is taking place. So there's farmers that are having to plow things under. I mean, we saw huge instances of this during the pandemic. You saw those stories of Idaho potato farmers that, you know, had to waste millions of pounds of potatoes because people stopped ordering. So you see that you you see the food that's not perfect when it gets to this store I can't tell you how many truckers Give us calls all the time because if they're late say they're sitting on in traffic Because there's a bad accident on the highway and they get to that grocery store that distribution center late They can have the whole truck refused And so now you have 18 wheelers of probably 20 pallets worth of food items that now these truckers are like having to figure out how they're going to get rid of it because they've got to go and get another load of food.

12:04It's the events that we go to, right? How many times have you been to a wedding or a conference and you're sitting in that ballroom? Oh yeah, the cruise ships. I mean, I was at a conference maybe about two weeks ago and you could see that they had planned for, let's say, a thousand people. I mean, there were hundreds of tables and every table was already preset with a salad and bread on the table. And I looked around and there must have been at least 20 tables that were completely empty. Wow. Yes. I mean, we've all experienced that. And so we're talking about, it's totally insane. I mean, we produce so much food in this country and waste so much food in this country.

12:47And so So this is a fact. And I don't even know what percentage of methane and carbon emissions come from landfills in the U.S. It must be very significant. Exactly. Project Drawdown last year said that food waste was the number one thing that we could do to combat global climate change. And just to give you some aspects, food is the single largest source of everything that's in a landfill. And just by being there, rotting away, it releases emissions. Exactly. It releases harmful methane gas emissions. And beyond that, I mean, when you think of where landfills are and you think about poverty and you think about health outcomes and social determinants of health, it's really bad on every level.

13:30The second thing I want to kind of ask you about is how people are fed, right? So there are – I'm in the Bay Area here. It has obviously a huge crisis with unhoused people. And it's shocking when you see it. You're in Atlanta. There's also challenges in cities like Atlanta, New York, Chicago, et cetera. Most people who cannot afford food, who need to be fed, how do they get it? Where do they get it from? Yeah, there's a lot of different resources. There's certainly churches and synagogues that are feeding and having different programs on a daily and weekly basis. There are soup kitchens that still exist.

14:13A lot of times if they are experiencing homelessness, they are sometimes in a homeless resource program. So whether they're staying at a shelter, they're going to the shelter for certain times. It could be like it's too cold outside or there's storms and they know that there are places to go where they can actually get food. And then there's people like me who are bringing food directly to people that are living on the streets on a daily basis. All right. So while you were doing Sunday Soul, what did you start to see that you realized was a problem? I mean, were there gaps in what these other groups and organizations and agencies were doing that you saw?

14:52I mean, did you see an opportunity to innovate in a new way? Yeah, there were a lot of things that I saw. One thing, I started to see a lot of families that would be there on a daily basis. Every time I was feeding, they were there. And one time I talked to the family, and I'll never forget, they were a family of nine. You know, so husband, wife, seven kids. And I remember I would say like, you guys are here every week because I watched them, you know, get out of homelessness, get into a house, you know, start trying to rebuild. And one day the dad said, you know, we have to sell our food stamps every now and then just so we could pay our rent.

15:29And I mean, that really, that stuck to me. And he wanted to know when we were going to be there so that they could come and get food because it was a consistent, good amount of food. And he knew his family was going to get a good meal. So I saw that. I saw that people were really desperate for food. So even if they had food stamps or all the things that we think make people have access to food, there's still a lot of struggle. And that people, when they have to make a choice, am I going to pay for my rent? Am I going to pay for my car payment? Am I going to pay for medicine? Or am I going to pay for food?

16:02Food is often the first to go. But the biggest thing that happened with this, guys, I woke up one morning in February of 2016. So by this time, I've been feeding on the streets for almost four years. And a video of one of my restaurants went viral. I had a 15-second video on Instagram. There was nothing but just little pictures. And they captioned it, look what this group did for the homeless in Atlanta. And people started tagging me in the video. And I woke up, and there was like all these friend requests. And one of the reoccurring questions that people kept on asking me was, who donated the food?

16:39But I started to think like, I don't get enough of this food donated. And I go to Google like so many people do. And I literally Googled what happens to extra food at the end of the night from restaurants. And I will say, I fell into the deepest rabbit hole. I remember like it was yesterday, being up until almost four o 'clock in the morning, reading a Harvard business school. their food law policy had done like an 83-page report on food waste. And I'm reading through this and I am blown away with how much food goes to waste in this country, thinking about the millions that are hungry and realizing, wait, we waste all the food that could feed all the hungry.

17:20And it just was like an aha moment, like, hey, I've got to connect these two. We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, more from Jasmine Crow Houston, the founder of Goodr. You're listening to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. Stay with us.

17:41Ever had one of those afternoons where your brain just quits on you? You're sluggish, hangry, maybe even a little foggy. What if it's your glucose? See, glucose is an energy currency for your mind and body. When it's stable, you're on point. When it crashes, so can you. That's why lingo is so interesting. Lingo is a glucose wearable designed to help you connect the dots between your glucose and what you eat, how you move, and how you feel. It shows your glucose data in real time. Instead of guessing, you see the impact of your choices. Maybe that healthy snack is actually sending your glucose on a roller coaster.

18:18Or that afternoon walk is the perfect stabilizer. It's about unlocking your consistent best all day long by truly understanding your body's unique responses. Get to know your glucose and learn about how to build healthy habits that work for you with Lingo, designed for you by Abbott. Through November 30th, use code GUY10 on hellolingo.com to get 10 % off a Lingo plan purchase, one use per customer. This offer cannot be combined with other offers, U.S., Puerto Rico, and U.K. only. The Lingo glucose system is for users 18 years and older, not on insulin. It is not intended for diagnosis of diseases, including diabetes.

18:58Individual responses may vary. You know, I've always loved how Airbnb makes travel feel more authentic. Like when you stay in a home, as opposed to a hotel room, you can gather around a table with friends or watch movies on a couch like you do at home. And I've had so much fun on Airbnb experiences during my travels that I decided to host my own in San Francisco this month, an original Airbnb experience all about unlocking your next big move in work or life. To learn more, head to airbnb.com slash guy. We all have moments when we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato.

19:43Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at Schwab.com.

20:04Welcome back. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Lab. And my guest is Jasmine Crow Houston, the CEO and founder of Goodr. So you basically go down this rabbit hole. you discover what we've just been talking about, that all of this food is wasted. Because most people don't know that. They don't know that 40 % of our food is just, ends up thrown away, right? I didn't know it. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't know it. And so you start to read this and clearly the gears start to turn your head. You're thinking, maybe this isn't a food problem. Yeah. I think that's exactly what it is. And the other thing that started to happen too, it was around the emergence of the food delivery.

20:45And, you know, I'm like, wow, all this technology is being created to get food faster to people like you and I. But who's going to build something for the have nots, the millions of people that don't know where their next meal is coming from? Who's building for that? And we have all this food going to waste, all these people that are going hungry. Why are we not trying to build something that will connect those two together in the interim solve two really big problems? I mean, we're talking about all this food going to waste, all these people going hungry, and we're not solving it. And that's really what I thought I could do.

21:23So basically, you land on this notion, this concept that it's really a logistics problem. Feeding people in the United States should not be – it should not be a struggle. There's more than enough food for everybody in the world. and essentially most of the time a lot of food that's thrown away is still perfectly safe, perfectly good to eat, right? More than you would believe for sure. I mean, for example, there are rules that govern like shelf life of food, right? Sell by dates, et cetera. I mean, on any given day, you can probably go behind a supermarket and see what they're throwing away. And much of that food is perfectly safe and consumable, right?

22:06A hundred percent. Still till this day, I probably get no less than three to four either emails, tags on social media posts of people, everyday people going to a grocery store, seeing this perfectly good food that gets thrown out. I remember one time a lady, and it's funny because she said she actually got in trouble for it, but a Walmart in Atlanta, the power went out. And I mean, went out for less than 20 minutes, right? And because of that, they were throwing away everything in their freezers and everything in their coolers. And so she calls us and she was like, hey, I don't know if you guys can get here, but we're about to throw all this food away.

22:47So we get up there, we bring like, I think we had like a U-Haul truck, one of our vans. And I was, I mean, everything that's in the freezer. So all this food, just all of it just going away. So I'm like, oh my God, like, does this happen every single day? What's funny, guys, is if we go to Walmart or we go to a grocery store and we purchase groceries, what if we stop someplace else? Chances are we don't even make it home in 20 to 30 minutes, right? We get home, we put this food in our refrigerator and freezer, and it's perfectly fine. But because of this fear of litigation, this fear I'm going to get in trouble if this food isn't perfectly great, it does go to waste.

23:28And I remember the day that we did that and we took that food to different senior homes. And this had to be thousands of dollars, thousands. I mean, maybe$20 ,000,$30 ,000 worth of food that we were able to give to these seniors that would have gone to waste. And it was perfectly good food. All right. So 2017, you decide to found Goodr. And the idea is, let me build a logistics company that essentially can find and deliver food to people who need it. First of all, I think a lot of people will be surprised to hear that it's a for-profit. It's not a nonprofit. It's not a charity. So why did you decide to go that route rather than a nonprofit or charity organization?

24:11Yeah. You know, and you know this about me, right? I knew all about nonprofits. There was, that was the thing that I knew. I mean, I have been building nonprofits for however long. So that's, that I knew. The reason why I decided to go a for-profit, right, as soon as I realized that it was definitely this logistics problem was that businesses were already paying to throw the food away. Like, that's what I realized. That was kind of like the weight. They were paying people to haul it off. They're paying people to haul it off. This perfectly good food, they're paying companies to come and get it and throw it in landfill, which, oh, by the way, is terrible for our environment, a leading contributor to global climate change, you know, a huge problem in itself.

24:52And so I thought, wait, I'm going to come and offer these businesses a sustainable way to deal with their waste. And it's going to help their community. It's going to save them money, both via tax deductions that they're going to get for donating the food that's edible, but also by paying for excess waste pickups that they don't technically need. And they're going to help their community. It's going to be good on the environment. They're going to help feed people. And that that was a business. And for the first year of the business, every company that I spoke to was like, oh, we can't work with you because you're not a nonprofit.

25:27I was like, what? And then it started to make real business sense because they were already paying waste companies to throw the food away. Yeah. And also, I mean, if you were a nonprofit, you would be spending 95 % of your time fundraising, raising money from anyone anywhere. Oh, all the time. I would say 99 % of my time fundraising and just never knowing when the next donation was going to come, when the next grant was going to come. Nonprofits are hard business. Yeah. All right. So you decide to run as a for-profit. And the idea was that essentially companies, restaurants, grocery stores, catering companies, they're already paying people to haul away their food waste.

26:16And most of it, what we call food waste, is actually food that hasn't been eaten, consumed, still packaged in many cases. Many cases. And so your idea was, well, why don't we just essentially be the waste management provider? Why don't we deal with that? Exactly. That's exactly what I thought. And it was interesting because I didn't want to use the term waste because, to your point, this isn't all wasted food. A lot of this is surplus food. So we started offering a service, what I called Surplus Food Recovery. your excess food. And what I told the clients that we were doing is we were solving their surplus food supply chain problem, because right now they were just throwing it all in landfill.