Kroger's innovation fund names inaugural cohort
The Innovation Fund, a program of Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation, has named its inaugural cohort of innovators, selected from nearly 400 applicants who submitted interest earlier this year during the first open call.
The Innovation Fund, a program of Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation, has named its inaugural cohort of innovators, selected from nearly 400 applicants who submitted interest earlier this year during the first open call. The invitation welcomed innovators to submit ideas and solutions to prevent food waste for an opportunity to receive a grant, ranging from $25,000 to $250,000 per project, from the $1 million designated for the first cohort.
The foundation’s board of directors, with support from its advisory council, evaluated the proposals and identified the top seven opportunities to advance the foundation’s mission to create Zero Hunger | Zero Waste communities. Key criteria included alignment with the Zero Hunger | Zero Waste mission, potential for positive impact in U.S. communities, ease of implementation, geography, and measurability and scalability.
The inaugural cohort features:
- Food Forest (Cincinnati): Uses technology to source products through multiple channels, maximizing fulfillment efficiencies and minimizing the carbon footprint of delivery logistics. The Food Forest app uses dynamic pricing and recommendations to offer incentives to customers and mitigate wasteful behavior.
- Imperfect (San Francisco): The national online grocer sources imperfect produce and surplus food like grains, nuts, oil, bread, milk, and cheese directly from farmers, growers, and food purveyors and delivers these goods directly to customers’ doors through a customizable subscription service.
- mobius (Knoxville, Tenn.): Converts industrial organic waste streams from food, forestry, and agriculture into renewable chemicals and materials. Its first products are biodegradable plastics and polymers created from industrial organic waste, with applications focused in agriculture, horticulture, and foodservice packaging.
- Replate (Berkeley, Calif.): Creates technology to reliably redistribute surplus food from businesses and events directly to nonprofits in need.
- Ripe Revival (Greenville, N.C.): A manufacturer of nutrient-dense protein gummies that are made utilizing proprietary extraction technology, providing a profitable solution for farmers’ excess produce.
- Seal the Seasons (Chapel Hill, N.C.): The mission is to increase access to local food by reducing on-farm food waste and providing family farms with a reliable income stream by selling locally and regionally grown frozen fruits and vegetables year-round. It partners with local family farms on a state-by-state basis to source local produce while in season, freeze it within 24 hours of picking, and sell it to local grocers in the grower’s home region.
- Winnow (Iowa City, Iowa): Builds artificial intelligence tools to help chefs measure food waste and provide stakeholders with transparent, measurable, and actionable data, helping run more profitable and sustainable kitchens. The data communicates food waste reduction opportunities and details where food is being lost—whether as a result of customer food preferences, preparation, storage, or overproduction issues.
The inaugural cohort will use the funding provided by the foundation to implement projects over the next 12 months in cities across America. “We’re excited to see our inaugural cohort work toward meaningful and measurable solutions to prevent, recover, and recycle food waste, with the possibility of reducing food waste by up to 7.2 million pounds,” said Jessica Adelman, president of Kroger’s Zero Hunger | Zero Waste Foundation.
