Waste Hater: DoorDash’s Sueli Shaw
Sueli Shaw leads Social Impact at DoorDash, the nation’s leading on-demand food platform founded in 2013. Their flagship social impact program, Project DASH, leverages DoorDash’s logistics expertise to tackle the dual epidemics of hunger and food waste. Project DASH is a strong logistical partner of Replate, so we wanted to speak with the woman behind it all about her connection to food, and how she ended up spearheading community initiatives for DoorDash.
Sueli’s first job as a college graduate foreshadows where she is today. Her work had her splitting time between the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and GrowNYC. She did outreach for both organizations, focusing on helping people claim their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits and also educating them on how to utilize them. Since then, she spent several years in program development and philanthropy before joining DoorDash.
Beyond work, food has always been important in her life. Sueli feels a strong link between her mother and food; her mom is from Taiwan and raised her daughter on a diversity of flavors and combinations. Sueli feels that the teachings from her mom support her both in her love of cooking, as well as in ensuring nothing is wasted. She says that the cooking skills and the understanding of ingredients she garnered from her mother lead her to “cook from first principles”, intuiting how to bring foods and flavors together. This creative sense can make it easier to prepare food without wasting ingredients. She recognizes that such efficiency can prove more difficult for those with less experience or passion for cooking.
Her excitement for cooking is mirrored in her excitement for her work. Sueli appreciates that, at DoorDash, the impetus for social impact initiatives frequently comes from internal brainstorming around solutions to challenges like climate change and food insecurity. Project DASH began as a hackathon project created by employees who wanted to use the DoorDash platform to connect donated food with hunger relief nonprofits. Sueli joined the team after the project was launched. Her position offers exciting blank space within which to innovate. A newer DoorDash initiative Kitchens Without Borders launched in 2019 to support and highlight immigrant-owned restaurants on the DoorDash platform. This initiative also came out of a company hackathon, further showcasing the internal passion for figuring out new ways the platform can support social causes.
While she’s excited about the work that has been accomplished so far, Sueli has ambitions for social impact and sustainability at DoorDash. She sometimes substitutes the word innovation for impact - especially where there are opportunities to create social impact through new use cases for the DoorDash product. It’s what she values about DoorDash’s logistics partnership with Replate: we have found complementary competencies to have the most impact. This is where Sueli sees partnerships at their best, when the result is greater than the sum of its parts. She strives for solutions that go beyond surface level to reach meaningful change.