food-waste
(11)
Sumer Johal
Sumer Johal is a technology executive and entrepreneur with more than 25 years building digital-first organizations across agtech, bioenergy, semiconductors, financial services, and consumer retail. He grew up in a farming family in Punjab, India, studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, and has spent the past decade focused on food and agriculture. He founded the food-industry big-data company Agralogics, launched and led AgStack at the Linux Foundation, ran the precision-agriculture company Semios (which rebranded as Almanac), and became CEO of Full Harvest, the B2B produce marketplace, as it moved into AI-driven agentic orchestration for the food supply chain.
Jamie Strachan
Jamie Strachan is the CEO of Nabaco, a San Marcos, Texas agricultural-science company building natural, clay-based barrier coatings that extend the shelf life of fresh produce and cut food waste. A produce-industry executive with more than 20 years in the business, he previously ran Green Giant Fresh (Growers Express) and founded and chaired the leafy greens marketing effort in California. At Nabaco he is commercializing a patented, tasteless and odorless protection technology across pre-harvest, packaging, and post-harvest applications, including a distribution partnership with AgroFresh.
Ryan Begin
Ryan Begin is the co-founder and CEO of Divert, a Concord, Massachusetts impact-technology company that grew from a two-person idea in 2007 into a nationwide network of anaerobic digestion facilities. Divert prevents wasted food across roughly 7,800 retail locations, donates edible surplus, and turns the rest into renewable natural gas. A Maine native and Clarkson-trained electrical engineer, Begin left Raytheon to build the company alongside co-founder Nick Whitman.
Ben Parry
Ben Parry is the CEO of Compost Crew, a Rockville, Maryland public benefit corporation turning food scraps into soil across the Washington, D.C. region. After more than a decade financing solar and wind projects on five continents, he bought a scrappy three-truck compost hauler in 2018 and grew it into one of the Mid-Atlantic's largest organics recyclers, with more than 20,000 customers, a 40-truck fleet, and a network of local Compost Outpost sites that close the loop between kitchen buckets and nearby farms.
Ricky Ashenfelter
Ricky Ashenfelter is the co-founder and CEO of Spoiler Alert, a Boston-based B2B software company that helps major food and CPG brands sell, discount, and donate excess and short-dated inventory before it becomes waste. He co-founded the company in 2015 with Emily Malina while earning his MBA at MIT Sloan, building on earlier work in sustainability consulting at Deloitte and the U.S. EPA. Under his leadership Spoiler Alert works with global brands like Nestle, Kraft Heinz, and Danone, and has helped keep more than 500,000 tons of product out of landfills. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs list in 2017.
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.
Benjamin Chesler
Benjamin Chesler is the CEO of North Spore, a Portland, Maine company that sells mushroom grow kits, spawn, sterile substrates and fungi wellness products to home and commercial growers. Before mushrooms, he co-founded Imperfect Foods, the grocery delivery startup that rescued cosmetically imperfect produce and recovered more than 250 million pounds of food. A Brown graduate and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he is a self-described systems thinker who got his start co-founding the Food Recovery Network as a college student and later helped build startup programs at Northeastern's Roux Institute.
James Kanoff
James Kanoff is the co-founder and CEO of Terradot, a climate company using enhanced rock weathering to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by spreading crushed silicate rock across farmland. He launched Terradot in 2024 with $58.2M in funding, including a $54M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and backing from Google, Microsoft, John Doerr and Sheryl Sandberg, and has already signed some of the largest carbon-removal deals in the field's history. Before Terradot, while a Stanford undergraduate sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic, he co-founded The Farmlink Project, a nonprofit that has rescued well over 130 million pounds of surplus food for communities facing hunger.
Matt Schwartz
Matt Schwartz is the CEO and co-founder of Afresh, a San Francisco-based AI company building the operating system for fresh food in grocery retail. A Stanford MBA alumnus with a lifelong obsession with food systems, he co-founded Afresh in 2017 after discovering that billion-dollar grocery chains were still managing produce orders with paper and pen. Under his leadership, Afresh has raised $181.8M in total funding, deployed across 12,500+ departments in 40 states, and prevented more than 200 million pounds of food waste - serving major chains including Albertsons, Meijer, and Wakefern.
Manik Suri
Manik Suri is the Founder & CEO of GlacierGrid (formerly Therma), a San Francisco-based climate tech company that uses AI, IoT sensors, and intelligent controls to cut energy waste from refrigeration and cooling systems - responsible for nearly 10% of global emissions. A Harvard and Cambridge alumnus who once worked at D.E. Shaw and the White House National Economic Council, Suri pivoted from policy and finance to build tech that keeps food cold, businesses profitable, and the planet a degree cooler. GlacierGrid counts McDonald's, 7-Eleven, Domino's, and Marriott among its clients, has raised over $29 million in funding, and was named one of TIME's America's Top GreenTech Companies for 2025.