The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Supporting Food Waste Solution Providers

The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Meet Our Grantees!

We're excited to introduce our new cohort of grantees for the latest open call of the ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund, Minimizing Methane Through Food Waste Solutions. They are nine organizations that are advancing composting infrastructure and climate-smart innovations across the beef and dairy sectors to reduce methane, one of the world’s most potent greenhouse gases.

Black Earth Compost has scaled across the Northeast by prioritizing affordable food scrap collection, decentralized compost facilities, contamination removal, and customer trust. With ReFED's support, they will build a mobile trash removal machine proven for food waste mixed with compostable packaging.

Compost Research & Education Foundation (CREF) is modernizing the nation’s compost testing standards to strengthen compost quality, improve measurement methodologies, and help build greater trust and scalability across the composting industry.

Fermeate converts whey byproducts from dairy production into valuable food-grade ingredients and proteins through fermentation, diverting high-organic-load waste streams away from wastewater systems where they can generate methane emissions.

Gilly makes cattle feed ingredients that unlock the nutritional value of agricultural byproducts like tomato pomace, grape pomace, and soybean hulls, while reducing methane intensity.

Golden State Foods is developing replication toolkits and industry-facing resources to help reduce beef waste across its operations and share learnings broadly with major industry groups, including the Meat Institute and the U.S. Roundtable for Sustainable Beef.

NewTerra Compost is proactively building infrastructure in “composting deserts” like Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, markets with no regulatory pressure but clear operational need, demonstrating that viable service models can be established ahead of policy mandates.

Organicycle is pioneering a partnership model with Waste Management to co-locate composting operations at existing waste sites, reducing permitting friction and accelerating infrastructure buildout in regions like Michigan and Northern Indiana.

Rust Belt Riders (RBR) is building a future where food scraps become soil and workers become owners. RBR is a worker-owned cooperative that leads sustainable organic waste management in Northeast Ohio by partnering with food manufacturers, hospitals, schools, restaurants, municipalities, and residents. Food scraps composted by RBR are recycled into living soils that serve the community as Tilth Soil.

University of Georgia researchers are transforming surplus fruits, vegetables, and other agricultural byproducts into climate-smart cattle feed through a fermentation platform that produces medium-chain fatty acids shown to improve feed efficiency and reduce methane emissions from cattle.

Current Open Call

Minimizing Methane Through Food Waste Solutions

Congratulations to the grantees for this open call!

Reducing food loss and waste is one of the most powerful levers to cut methane emissions. ReFED’s research shows that scaling food recycling and diversion is one of the most immediate, cost-effective strategies to reduce methane today, while tackling loss within beef and dairy systems can unlock major long-term impact.

This open call for ReFED’s Catalytic Grant Fund was seeking bold solutions and initiatives in two high-impact areas:

Advancing food recycling: Enhancing sorting, decontamination, processing, and access to create more effective and efficient systems.
Reducing methane in the beef and dairy sectors: Cutting loss and waste by lowering animal mortality, improving supply chain efficiency to get more products to market, preventing food waste at the household level, and reducing enteric emissions through climate-smart feed additives derived from waste streams.

Contact Us

View Eligibility Requirements

To learn more about this open call theme and the challenges that ReFED aims to solve through the Catalytic Grant Fund, please visit the FAQ section.

About the Fund

Catalyzing Food Waste Solutions

The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund accelerates promising food waste solutions across the entire food system. Through targeted open-call cycles, we deploy recoverable and non-recoverable grants, paired with hands-on support, to initiatives with the highest potential for meaningful food waste reduction. Powered by ReFED’s best-in-class insights and deep sector expertise, each grant cycle is built around priority food waste themes, directing catalytic capital where it can unlock greater impact and funding.

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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 Sam Buck, ReFED's Director of Development & Strategic Impact at [email protected].

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Learn About Our Previous Open Call

Maximizing the Harvest

On-farm produce loss is a major contributor to food waste, with U.S. farms generating more than 17 million tons of surplus food in 2023 alone. This surplus—nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables—represents a missed opportunity to reach its original intended consumer, all while millions face hunger. ReFED’s Catalytic Grant Fund is seeking innovative technologies, solutions, and initiatives that can reduce on-farm waste, maximize the value of surplus produce, and establish new market opportunities while increasing profitability for farmers. Join us in eliminating and valorizing on-farm food loss!

Meet the Cohort

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 Sam Buck 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 works with food businesses, funders, researchers, food waste solution providers, policymakers, and more to solve food waste.