Old Problems, Tech Solutions: A Reflection on our Biggest Year Yet

As 2019 winds down to a close, we find ourselves reflecting on all of the growth and change Replate has been through in our almost four years of operations. We’ve gone from one man with a cart to contracted Food Rescuers in cities all over North America. Our passion and urgency for our mission has remained Replate’s touchstone through any evolution, trial, or tribulation, keeping us focused on our commitment to creating new solutions to old problems. We’re not afraid to do things differently, which is what drives the constant innovation and iterations of our product, as well as our service to our clients. The problems we’re tackling in our day to day are serious - climate change and food insecurity are long-term, multi-pronged issues that will require systemic change and political overhaul to reach lasting solutions. What we do is divert edible surplus from the waste stream and support those experiencing food insecurity; we are shifting culture to demonstrate the importance of these issues and the plausibility of putting an end to them.

As the problems we face continue to loom larger, our technology must advance to find solutions more quickly and efficiently. This is one of the ways in which we’re not afraid to take a different path from nonprofits that have come before us, to utilize and build a range of technological tools to support and lead our processes as a nonprofit food recovery service. It’s these tools that support us in addressing food insecurity and food waste on a daily basis.

Replate’s first several months of operations were fueled by a few strong relationships, some webforms, and emails and text exchanges to get our operations off the ground. As these relationships were strengthened, and the quality of our customer service and the urgency of our mission was demonstrated and felt, we grew first by word of mouth above anything else. At the time, there was no digital infrastructure built to enable food rescue for restaurants, businesses, or any other surplus food generator. While our basic tech model and this word-of-mouth marketing worked during these early, scrappy days of Replate, we knew that if we wanted to scale at a global level, to reach our ultimate goal of enabling food rescue around the world, we would need to create and utilize robust and comprehensive tech products.

Now, almost four years later, we have built our own platform that allows surplus food generating businesses to quickly and easily schedule an on-demand pick up of their food to be donated. This platform expanded into a personalized dashboard for every account holder to customize their food donation schedules and to see a calculation of their cumulative impact in social and environmental metrics. Our recipient clients have similar dashboards to manage their specific needs. This portal allows them to input and customize their information as well, which allows Replate’s Operations team to know when and where to send donations.

The engineering team at Replate is small but mighty. We started with one very hard-working volunteer engineer and have since expanded to one full-time lead software engineer, three part-time engineers, and a product manager. For a team of our size, our Product Manager is a unique asset that helps interface between the operations and engineering/design departments, which makes all the difference in how our products are created. This difference is emblematic of Replate’s drive and culture - we’re seeking transparency, clear communication and collaboration at every step along the way. For a non-profit of our size, having this many people dedicated to building efficient tech products that help us constantly improve our services and operations makes all the difference in the way we tackle the day to day issues of food waste and food insecurity. This difference is emblematic of Replate’s commitment to creating new solutions to old problems; we’re taking different steps.

Our dashboard software is just one small part of the technologies we use. We have adopted technologies into our systems and operations that other companies have created. Our fleet and management of Food Rescuers are a great example of this adoption. Replate’s Operations team utilizes a dispatching software to dispatch and track our Food Rescuers’ food donation pick up and drop off locations. We’ve integrated this software with our Dashboards to allow clients to check the ETA of the food rescuer assigned to their pickup or dropoff. The dispatching software is also what allows us to collect data from every pickup on how many pounds of food are being donated - which then allows us to understand the environmental impact of the edible waste we’re diverting from landfill. This past November alone, we rescued 52,783 pounds of food across all of our markets, diverting 712,570.5 pounds of CO2 from the atmosphere and creating 43,985 meals.

Our HQ team of mostly millennials has quickly adapted to all the different ways in which we incorporate technologies to perform our work. Without the addition of technology enabling us to accomplish our work faster, more efficiently, and with more agility, we would not have been able to scale as quickly as we have, nor would we have been able to rescue more than 2 million meals to redistribute to organizations serving those experiencing food insecurity. At our core, we are an ever evolving and ever ambitious team of people, and leveraging technology allows us to meet and surpass the goals we set for our company. And as Replate continues to grow, we’re bringing other food recovery organizations to the table through our upcoming Replate Rescue dashboard, by using our strong partnerships and technologies to remove their barriers to efficiency and support them in scaling their operations so we can achieve the ultimate goal of enabling efficient and data-driven food rescue around the world.