food-rescue
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Food Lion
Food Lion built a durable regional grocery business by treating convenience as a system: the right store, the right local assortment, a useful loyalty program, and less edible food going to waste. Its quiet advantage is how those pieces reinforce one another.
Replate
Replate is a tech-enabled nonprofit that reduces food waste and food insecurity by connecting businesses with surplus food to nearby community organizations. Through a web-based platform, companies schedule on-demand or recurring pickups in a few clicks, and Replate's 'Friendly Food Rescuers' collect and deliver the food along optimized routes. Donors track the social and environmental impact of every donation - meals delivered, water saved, and CO2 diverted - through a personalized dashboard. Founded in 2016 by Maen Mahfoud, Replate operates across major U.S. cities and the Middle East.
Jean Pierre Azañedo
Jean Pierre Azañedo is the CEO and co-founder of Zero Waste Co. (ZWC) and CoreZero, a Miami-based climate-tech venture that turns food waste and other discarded material into tradable carbon credits. A second-time founder from Peru, he previously built Kanay into that country's leading waste-management company before it was acquired by France's Séché Group. In 2023 CoreZero serialized the world's first carbon credits generated from food-waste diversion, working with the Mexican food-banking network. Azañedo's thesis is simple and stubborn: waste has boundless value, and nobody makes something just to throw it away.
Maen Mahfoud
Maen Mahfoud is the founder and CEO of Replate, a technology-driven food rescue organization he started in 2016 while studying molecular biology at UC Berkeley. Raised in Syria, where his mother sent him out on his bike to deliver the family's surplus lunch to neighbors in need, he came to California to study medicine and instead built a logistics-and-software platform that dispatches drivers to collect leftover food from businesses and route it to nonprofits. Replate has recovered millions of pounds of surplus food, served hundreds of community organizations, and counts Netflix, Walmart, Amazon, Chipotle, and Slack among its corporate donors. He is a 2023 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award recipient and a DRK entrepreneur.