The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Supporting Food Waste Solution Providers

The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Announcing the "Minimizing Methane through Food Waste Solutions" Open Call

Current Open Call

Minimizing Methane Through Food Waste Solutions

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.

ReFED’s Catalytic Grant Fund is 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.

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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 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 deploys its capital through an ongoing series of open call cycles that are built around specific, priority food waste themes.

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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!

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.

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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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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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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 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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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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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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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 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.

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The ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund

Supporting Food Waste Solution Providers