S6 Ep8: Be a Food Hero— Saving the Food Industry with Food Rescue with Leah Lizarondo
“Food waste happens at every stage of the supply chain so there are many instances that we can, ourselves, rescue.” — Leah Lizarondo
Food shortage is a pressing issue affecting people of all countries and cultures across the globe. Sadly, it's not necessarily due to lack of food production, but the excessive waste that contributes mostly to this problem.
Food Rescue Hero is a non-profit organization that is tackling this problem head-on. Hence, it is dubbed as the Door Dash of food surplus. Food Rescue Hero collects and redistributes excess food from donors and distributes it to partner charities, schools, and community programs. Through their efforts, Food Rescue Hero has saved thousands of meals from going to waste and have ensured those meals get to people who need them.
Listen in as Justine and Food Rescue Hero Founder, Leah Lizarondo share how this initiative can be a model for food rescue projects and how we can be food heroes as consumers. Leah also shares pitching tips to convince potential investors, how to set up a model for an organization, and how our narrative can change our whole conversation.
Connect with Leah:
Leah is the Founder of Food Rescue Hero, a food recovery technology platform used in over 25 cities. The platform has redirected over 100 million pounds of perfectly good food from going to waste toward feeding people experiencing food insecurity. Prior to founding Food Rescue Hero, Leah worked in technology, focused on investment, market, and brand strategy for early-stage companies, and in brand management for global FMCG.
Leah has won numerous awards for her work including Fast Company’s World Changing Ideas Award in 2020, Carnegie Mellon University’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2022, the Vital Voices Global Leadership Award in 2020 and WE Empower UN SDG challenge in 2019, a global award for women social entrepreneurs. She has been named as one of the 100 Most Influential Leaders by both Pittsburgh Business Times and City & State PA. Most recently, she was recognized in the Grist 50, a list of emerging leaders creating impactful solutions to climate change.
Connect with Food Rescue Hero:
Episode Highlights:
01:05 The Door Dash of Food Surplus
07:26 From Vision to Mission to Reality
12:24 Pitching Tips
17:04 Expanding the Model
Tweets:
The global food crisis is a complex issue that requires a multi-pronged approach. Sadly, this problem persists, not because we lack food, but because we waste food. Join in as @jreichman and @foodrescuehero Founder, @LeahLizarondo share how food rescue can help alleviate hunger. #podcast #entrepreneurship #socialgood #inspiration #impactmatters #NextGenChef #EssentialIngredients #foodrescuehero #foodrescue #endhunger #socialimpact #foodwaste
Inspirational Quotes:
02:13 "All of us know that food waste happens but I didn't realize it was up to almost half our food supply." —Leah Lizarondo
09:10 "We believed so much in the idea and we knew it was going to succeed; it was not very hard to invite others to invest in it.” — Leah Lizarondo
11:20 "Making it happen—a lot of it is taking it one day at a time and seeing where one step leads next.” —Leah Lizarondo
13:23 "Word is important. Instead of a pitch where you're trying to tell someone something, look at it as a conversation, then the whole thing changes.” —Leah Lizarondo
14:26 “Changing that narrative in your head can change the way you communicate and change the whole conversation." —Justine Reichman
16:47 “Food waste happens at every stage of the supply chain so there are many instances that we can, ourselves, rescue.” —Leah Lizarondo
Transcriptions:
Justine Reichman Good afternoon and welcome to Essential Ingredients. I'm your host, Justine Reichman. Today with me is Leah Lizarondo. She is the CEO and Founder of Food Rescue Hero. I'm so pleased to have you here. Leah, welcome.
Leah Lizarondo Thanks so much for having me, Justine.
Justine Reichman I'm so excited to get to chat with you and learn a little bit more about Food Rescue Hero and for our guests, and our listeners to learn a little bit more about it. So just if you wouldn't mind, for those listeners and viewers that are not familiar with Food Rescue Hero, if you could just start us off with like your 32nd pitch or whatever, you know, you have. So you could catch them up before we get chatting and we're all on a level playing field.
Leah Lizarondo Yeah. It's fairly simple. The best way to describe it is we are the DoorDash of food surplus. And yeah, and what we basically do is we take surplus food from grocery stores, restaurants, and we deliver them to charities. And the food is delivered, coordinated by an app just like these commercial services by volunteers. So that's why Food Rescue Heroes. So our drivers are all volunteers moving surplus food from where it's coming from to a nonprofit or charity that can use it to feed people who are hungry.
Justine Reichman Well, I like that. And I like the way that you explained it and compared it to DoorDash makes it very simple and easy to understand. So what inspired you to come up with this?
"All of us know that food waste happens but I didn't realize it was up to almost half our food supply." —Leah Lizarondo
Leah Lizarondo Yeah. So truly what inspired it is was a report that I read in 2012, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, which was titled Wasted. And it was in that report, where I first read that 40% of all the food we produce goes to waste. And that was a really shocking number to me, because I think all of us know that food waste happens but I didn't realize it was up to almost half our food supply. And so in looking at that problem, and seeing where the food surplus was coming from, you know, realizing that there is a new transport network and technology that can help us, you know, move food very cheaply, and even free from one location to the other. That was what really kind of ignited that possibility. So seeing the Door Dashes of the world that Uber Eats grow. It was taking that model and then translating it to surplus food.
Justine Reichman Yeah. And I think that there are other companies out there that do this, but I haven't seen them do it in this way.
Leah Lizarondo Yes, exactly. There are so many organizations that, you know, from the little church in the corner that takes the food from the bakery at the end of the day, so that they can, you know, distribute it to people in need to, you know, even some larger organizations, but none of them really used an app to coordinate its drivers. And so that way it can scale its operations in the way that these commercial food delivery services has. And so that's what we did. And Food Rescue Hero operates in about 25 cities in the US and Canada, with about 40,000 registered drivers.
Justine Reichman Okay. So you read the you read this paper this report in 2012, in 2012, what were you doing?
Leah Lizarondo What was I doing? Oh, actually, I was a food writer at that time.
Justine Reichman Oh, you're a food writer. Okay. You're a food writer. Is this your first entrepreneurial stint?
Leah Lizarondo It is actually, yes, it is. And it combines, you know, I also have a background in technology. I went to grad school at Carnegie Mellon. And you know, my, of course, I love food being a food writer. And yeah, so it's really combining those two things.
Justine Reichman So you went to-- you mentioned you went to Carnegie Mellon does that, I mean, I think of Carnegie Mellon, I think of somebody that is an engineering. Are you an engineer?
Leah Lizarondo No. I am not an engineer. I'm a technology policy person. So that's what I went to grad school for. So I, you know, I love technology. I understand it, but I cannot write code.
Justine Reichman You didn't even develop the app yourself?
Leah Lizarondo No. So the design was, you know, it's part of the team that designed it. And we have a team of engineers that are ably, you know, creating it and maintaining it.
Justine Reichman Okay. But this was your first stint and so you went from being-- but you have this background in policy and in food and in technology and you took all that background and that information and education and after reading this report and decided to create this business, from what you saw was a really big need, and you figured out because of your background, how to create it in an app. Right?
Leah Lizarondo Yeah. I was lucky enough, you know that, you know, life has led me so far to kind of this combination.
Justine Reichman Okay. So now you have this startup, which is, you know, takes a whole new skill set to do right. To be able to, you came up with the vision and now you have to build this business, and you did it on your own, because you're the founder, you didn't bring a co founder in.
Leah Lizarondo So for when it all started also with a smaller nonprofit here in that space in Pittsburgh, which is called 41 to Food Rescue. And for that, you know, there was a whole team of people and even with Food Rescue Hero. I might be kind of the figurehead and kind of the face for it and the spokesperson, but there's a whole big team around me, we are a team of almost 40 people, and have a team of leaders that are doing this with me.
Justine Reichman So my question, though, is you went from this idea, this ideation to the 40 people. So, you know, can you walk me through that, because we have a lot of founders that listen to these stories for inspiration. And it can be daunting, and it can be scary, and you come to these ideas with, you know, with no experience, no funding, and you're like, how do I go from A to Z, and 40 people as a lot. And, you know, you've shown great success, you've grown nationally and globally, because you're in Canada. I mean, it's US adjacent, right, but it's globally. You need passport to get there. You know, there's a lot of success in this, and you went from being a food writer to doing this. So to me, this is a great story that I think our listeners, and our viewers really get a lot out of hearing how you went from that to that. So walk us through it a little bit. Tell us how you had this idea and did you surround yourself with mentors? Did you, you know, and advisors, and at what point did you realize this really was a great idea. And now did you need to raise money for yourself and you know, funded? I've got a lot of questions for you.
Leah Lizarondo So I didn't actually, so my most immediate experience prior to this was food writing, but leading up to even that I've had a career of I would say, you know, to use the word adjacent as well, adjacent entrepreneurship. So I started my career out at one of the Fortune 500 consumer goods companies. I was a brand manager, which means, you know, I was responsible for the profit and loss of certain brands. And at that point, I would say that was my first CEO gig, right, because, you know, I would control or, you know, be responsible for everything from, you know, manufacturing, to research and development to advertising, and making sure that we, you know, the brand was as profitable as it could get, you know, margins, were also something that we constantly watched. And then after that, I worked in consulting, where I worked with a lot of technology startups get doing much of their marketing strategy, launch strategy, so worked a lot of entrepreneurs on their business plans. So the training was there to actually--
Justine Reichman I'm getting the feeling you had a lot-- all these different roles that you've played led you and gave you the experience and the insight and the groundwork to be able to do your job when you got there?
"We believed so much in the idea and we knew it was going to succeed; it was not very hard to invite others to invest in it.” — Leah Lizarondo
Leah Lizarondo Absolutely. I don't think I would have been able to do this without that past experience, for sure. And so it's really taking all of that and, you know, kind of having a good understanding of what is needed to start this. And, you know, mentioned funding as one of the key factors, of course. And I think the biggest learning curve for me was exactly that I have not raised money for an endeavor that I have but at the same time it you know, because we believed so much in the idea. And to your point, you know, we really kind of knew it was going to succeed. It was not very hard to invite others to invest in it.
Justine Reichman It's so interesting to hear people's journeys and your journey, because of course, you know, you're like, "Oh, I'm a Food writer that I did this. I'm like, Okay, let's talk about the in between."
Leah Lizarondo Right, right. Yes.
"Making it happen—a lot of it is taking it one day at a time and seeing where one step leads next.” —Leah Lizarondo
Justine Reichman You know, it's what I hear so often is, you know, we hear the story of Oatley and people are like oh, it was like an overnight success and like, okay, let's wait, step back a minute. That was not an overnight success, right. You know, they were around for years. Finally, they got to do the barista thing. And once they got in to do the barista thing, it felt like an overnight success. All the sudden there was-- people were using it. Everywhere became a household name because there was oat milk there. And it was there, right? There was many years that they were working, working, working, and they were popular in other countries. And so that's why it's so important and so interesting to me to hear how you got there.
Leah Lizarondo Yes. Right. It's certainly not, you know, we always hear of the successes, and we think they started yesterday, right. But there's many, many years, we didn't hear about them. So for us, it was, you know, leading up to this, again, knowing the work that I've done with other tech entrepreneurs, and, you know, working at consumer goods, kind of having a good understanding of what a profit must looks like, what goes into technology production, what is marketing, wow do we get all of the drivers to sign on. So you know, getting all of the, to your show ingredients together, you know, including the marketing and, you know, kind of the software engineering, putting costs associated with that, and then targeting which investors and funders would be interested in supporting something like this. So I think what I hear a lot from entrepreneurs is you do have a directional idea but the actual, you know, kind of making it happen. A lot of it is taking it one day at a time, and see where one step leads next. And with a lot of startups, because you're bootstrapping, you know, what needs attention first. And I think the best entrepreneurs that I admire are those entrepreneurs that can recognize how to triage that with very little money in place. And that's what I tried to learn from.
"Word is important. Instead of a pitch where you're trying to tell someone something, look at it as a conversation, then the whole thing changes.” —Leah Lizarondo
Justine Reichman So I'm curious, one thing that I get a lot of questions about is about pitching. It's scary. It's scary to go pitch. When people use the word pitch as oppose to, you know, having conversations and coffee and, you know, meeting up with somebody and just talking about their idea. But when they're talking about "pitching" and presenting and creating these formal decks, you know, it's a very different thing, right? So it's all in the narrative and the way that they're presenting it and talking about it. So I'd love to hear from you on your thoughts on that.
Leah Lizarondo So when I was starting, it was I felt the same way that you know, I would get nervous. I would, you know, go up there. Did I get it right. And I'm trying to get something from people. And I think the key thing there that changed for me was a couple of things, actually. The first is, you know, you were saying narrative. This is not-- when you do a pitch, it's not about hitting the points you think they want to hear. It's you understanding what your narrative is, why do you believe in it. And if you can create a narrative that you yourself are convinced about and you believe fully in it, then it becomes less of trying to convince someone else, but really just communicating why you believe in it. And then second thing that changed for me was, you know, this is not an asymmetrical relationship when we are trying to have a conversation with funders. I think, again, that word is important, instead of a pitch where you're trying to tell someone something. If you look at it as a conversation, then the whole thing changes. Because funders want to give money. That's their whole goal is where do I give my money. And then your goal is basically I have this product, this service that is so great, that you're giving money to it is actually a benefit to you.
Justine Reichman Exactly, it has to be mutual.
“Changing that narrative in your head can change the way you communicate and change the whole conversation." —Justine Reichman
Leah Lizarondo Exactly.
Justine Reichman Don't forget that it has to be mutual. It's not just, oh, I have to win them over. It's that this has to be mutually beneficial. You know, not only, is this a great thing that I'm building, and I'm super smart, and this idea is great, but you know, I want the right partnership. I want the right financial and human capital that I can partner with so we can build this together. That's where people fall short sometimes. And changing that narrative in your head, I think can change the way you communicate and change the whole conversation.
Leah Lizarondo Yes. So it's not just them giving you something you have something that is a value to them as well.
Justine Reichman Yeah. I totally agree. So tell me where are you guys today. So what year is this for you guys now that you've been around?
Leah Lizarondo So we are entering our ninth year, and we are currently in about 25 cities. We just launched the entire state of Delaware and we are in, you know, multiple cities in California. California is one of the most progressive food waste laws in the US. And so we're happy to have many partners there. And you know, all over the East Coast as well.
Justine Reichman Wow. Okay. Now, I know that there's lots of, you know, other food waste companies, and I know that yours, the way that is set up with the app makes it I think, innovative and a little different, right? We have the one that [inaudible], do you know that one? I forgot the name.
Leah Lizarondo Yes, yeah. They don't mobilize a fleet of drivers. So what we do is we have our own drivers, you know, over 40,000 registered on the app. It's the largest I would believe like volunteer driver network in the world. So every all these 40,000 people will get these push notifications, alerting them a food rescues near them, and they take food from one location to the other just like, you know, just like all of these other driver services that we avail of.
Justine Reichman Wow. And I think that's so great. So how did you think that that's got-- Replate was the one I was thinking of. Replate.
“Food waste happens at every stage of the supply chain so there are many instances that we can, ourselves, rescue.” —Leah Lizarondo
Leah Lizarondo Yes. Yeah. So Replate actually has their own fleet of paid drivers, but they also use existing driver services that they in turn pay as well.
Justine Reichman So how do you think that, you know, your model will change and dictate the ways that this area, this niche, this industry changes going forward?
Leah Lizarondo So foodways is such a huge problem, if you can imagine almost 1/3 to almost half our food supply going to waste, and certain foods more than others, such as fruits and vegetables. There's more than enough food to rescue for all of these models to be needed. And you know, food waste happens at every stage of the supply chain. So there's many instances that we can ourselves rescue, for instance, you know, we don't rescue from farms.
Justine Reichman That was my next question. It's like you read my mind, I was gonna ask you about the farmers, because there's a huge amount of waste before it ever leaves the farm.
Leah Lizarondo Exactly. So our solution is not for that, our solution is more appropriate for urban areas that have a high density of grocery stores, restaurants, etc, but also a high density of people, and also needs to be somewhat drivable. So for instance, New York City would be a little bit challenging for our model. So there's room for all of these food waste companies and organizations to work. There's food waste companies that, you know, try to target the problem at the source. You know, changing the way, you know, putting coating in some fruits and vegetables so that we can slow down their ripening process, you know, things like that. And then households are our largest sources of food waste, actually. And there's no peer to peer exchange, you know, if I have a harvest in my little tiny garden of zucchini, and I want to give it away, there's no app I can go to. So there's a lot of space for many, many different companies to work on this problem.
Justine Reichman So what's new and what's next for you going forward in the next few years?
Leah Lizarondo Well, there's again, as I said, you know, in the US alone, 62 million tonnes of food go to waste. Our goal is to be in 100 cities by 2030. So we are in about 25 or so right now, we have about seven years, three to 100. And make sure that the app can be used in all the major urban centers, if not, you know, just the US and Canada but you know, other countries as well.
Justine Reichman And so for those folks listening and watching today, if they wanted to find out if you were available in their city, how might they go about doing that?
Leah Lizarondo Yeah, follow us on social media at Food Rescue Hero or our website FoodRescueHero.org.
Justine Reichman Wonderful. And if there's a city that is not involved, and that city wanted to get involved, how might they propose that? How might they urge their city to reach out to you?
Leah Lizarondo Send us an email. We will work with you to make it happen. And that's how we've worked in all of the cities where Food Rescue Hero is.
Justine Reichman Awesome. Thank you, Leah so much for joining me. It was great to learn about your journey and what you're doing and how you're solving this problem.
Leah Lizarondo Thanks so much, Justine.
