The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Supporting Food Waste Solution Providers

The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Exciting News: Meet Our Grantees Revolutionizing Restaurant Food Waste Solutions!

Introducing Our Grantees!

We’re thrilled to be supporting this portfolio of top-notch organizations with vast potential to tackle restaurant food waste.

Afterlife Ag is a mushroom farming company offering a circular solution that allows restaurants to divert their food waste from landfills and then purchase the mushrooms grown from the otherwise wasted food.

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Center for EcoTechnology (CET) offers direct technical assistance to food businesses on wasted food reduction, recovery, and recycling and is developing a train-the-trainer program to enable other organizations to replicate CET's work and offer technical assistance to restaurants in their communities.

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ConnectedFresh Company uses sensors and AI to identify and flag issues with food safety and aging equipment, preventing significant spoilage and emergency repairs and is enhancing their 24/7 monitoring solutions to include advanced inventory management and waste tracking for restaurants.

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Food Rescue US is implementing a data-sharing feature within their existing food rescue web-based app to make food donation easier for restaurants by creating a dedicated API endpoint that will seamlessly integrate with the POS systems commonly used by restaurants.

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Green Dining Alliance certifies restaurants for sustainability and will offer restaurants an opportunity to receive direct support to implement and track food waste reduction strategies.

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Prism is developing a storage system designed for restaurants that uses a controlled atmosphere to extend the lifespan of fresh produce.

Calling All Restaurants!

Seize The Opportunity To Pilot Food Waste Solutions In Your Establishment For Free

The Catalytic Grant Fund’s second open call is your gateway to exclusive support for reducing food waste. Food waste reduction is a proven strategy for mitigating climate change while boosting a business’s cost-savings and operational efficiency. To maximize impact, we’re offering restaurants a chance to work with food waste solution providers in Summer 2024. Participating restaurants will get to pilot a food waste solution that best fits their operational needs, whether it be preventing wasted food, donating it to those in need, or recycling it through methods like composting or anaerobic digestion.Take action now to reap the environmental, social, and financial benefits of reducing food waste!

The intake submission period is now closed.

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This open call is made possible by the generous support of our anchor funder, Toast.org, which is dedicated to enriching the food experience for all and creating a healthier, more sustainable, and equitable world. Toast.org is the social impact arm of Toast, the cloud-based, all-in-one technology platform that helps restaurants streamline operations, increase revenue, and deliver amazing guest experiences.

Current Open Call

Serving Up Food Waste Solutions To Restaurants

We often perceive wasted food as the cost of doing business in independent restaurants. But today, with supply chain disruptions, the growing cost of food, and staffing challenges, those costs are becoming increasingly burdensome, creating an opening to reframe food waste reduction as the critical opportunity it is – to drive operational efficiency, deliver unique customer experiences, improve profit margins, and/or create a competitive advantage.

That's why our current open call for the Catalytic Grant Fund is focused on accelerating the adoption of food waste solutions for restaurants. We're looking for proven or pilot-ready solutions that are simple, affordable, and convenient to implement and/or have a strong business case for small to medium-sized independent restaurants – including increased cost savings, improved staff retention, higher customer acquisition, and more.

And to bolster the catalytic nature of this open call, we're excited to announce that a subset of the selected grantees will get a unique opportunity to pilot their solution with restaurants.

ABOUT THE PARTNERSHIP
This open call is made possible by the generous support of our anchor funder, Toast.org, which is dedicated to enriching the food experience for all and creating a healthier, more sustainable, and equitable world. Toast.org is the social impact arm of Toast, the cloud-based, all-in-one technology platform that helps restaurants streamline operations, increase revenue, and deliver amazing guest experiences.

View Open Call Requirements

About the Fund

Catalyzing Food Waste Solutions

The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund aims to accelerate the development and implementation of food waste solutions across the full food system by providing non-recoverable and recoverable grants and post-grant support to initiatives with high impact potential as measured by food waste reduced and GHG emissions reduced. The Catalytic Grant Fund...

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Contribute to the ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

We are deeply grateful to our funder partners who make the Catalytic Grant Fund possible, sharing our mission and vision for a more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive food system.

Learn more about how you can be part of this initiative by contacting Alexandria Coari, ReFED’s VP of Capital, Innovation, and Engagement at [email protected].

Anchoring Investors

Partnering Investors

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Previous Open Call

Consumer Food Waste

Consumers are the largest total generators of food waste, but it's not always easy for them to change wasteful behaviors. This first Open Call is focused on solutions and innovations in need of funding that can enable consumers to actively reduce their food waste at home – as well as in restaurant and foodservice settings – by making it obvious, affordable, and convenient. To bolster these solutions, the Catalytic Grant Fund seeks to support initiatives at a local, regional, and/or national level.

Meet the Cohort

Meet the Independent Review Committee

Featured Grantees from Previous Open Call Cycles

The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund provides recoverable and non-recoverable grants to nonprofit and for-profit organizations to help de-risk and scale high-impact solutions to food waste. We're proud to support the following grantees:

Transparent Path is working toward providing inventory traceability across the food supply chain through its existing platform and aims to develop a mobile app that builds consumer capacity to reduce food waste by giving them real-time information on freshness based on data and by reminding them to use purchased food before it spoils.

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Blue Earth Compost is bringing share tables paired with composting initiatives to Connecticut public schools combined with a food waste reduction classroom curriculum and toolkit to help others replicate the model elsewhere.

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Food Cycle Science Corporation (FCS) provides an at-home food waste recycling solution through its state-of-the-art countertop units, giving consumers a convenient, mess- and odor-free option for diverting their food waste from landfill and avoiding greenhouse gas emissions. FCS is seeking to expand its municipality partnership model into the US, through which FCS helps communities save on waste management costs and reduce food waste and harmful emissions, while creating a nutrient-rich byproduct that can be incorporated into compost and soil.

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Food Shift is developing The Food Shift Kitchen Guide with the aim of maximizing food use for household budgets and shifting consumer mindsets and behaviors to reduce wasted food in homes, schools, restaurants, and grocery stores.

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Food Recovery Network is a nonprofit growing their proven model of donation coordination and matching with a DEIJ lens.

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Growing Places Garden Project is developing a Fresh Chef Kit program and composting initiative to provide locally sourced and lightly processed produce to SNAP households in North Central Massachusetts by making the kits eligible for the local Healthy Incentive Program.

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Hidden Gems is a for-profit business which offers a solution to recycle the 800M pounds per year of nutrient-rich avocado pits that currently go into landfill.

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University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources is conducting research to better understand the current level of household food waste reduction knowledge, incentives, and practices of consumers who participate in federally funded nutrition education programs in CA and develop and implement appropriate educational strategies to be shared through the National Extension Foundation with all land-grant universities in the U.S.

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Upcycled Food Association is a nonprofit focused on convening, connecting, and growing awareness of the power of upcycling to fight food waste.

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The Wisely system is a patent-pending smart food storage container that uses hardware, software, and sensors to track the time and conditions with which perishable foods are stored. The smart-enabled system is completed by an accompanying consumer smartphone app.

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Stay Updated On The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

We'll be sharing out regular updates on upcoming information sessions and open calls for grantees via email. To receive updates, please complete the form below. For media inquiries or general questions, please email us at [email protected]. Interested in contributing to the Catalytic Grant Fund? Please email Alexandria Coari at [email protected].

“Food waste is one of many challenges restaurants navigate daily as they seek to stretch every dollar — and crumb. Toast and Toast.org are committed to leveraging the power of its people, products, and philanthropy to combat systemic issues in the restaurant industry and broader food ecosystem — while also making running a restaurant more sustainable, both financially and environmentally. Toast is proud to be a leading innovator in helping restaurants reduce food waste and we are delighted to partner with ReFED to seek scalable solutions to this critical issue.”

Jonathan Grimm

Co-Founder of Toast and CTO of Toast.org

ReFED is a national nonprofit working to end food loss and waste across the food system by advancing data-driven solutions to the problem.

Learn More About ReFED

The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Supporting Food Waste Solution Providers