Business For Good Podcast

Can Helping the Homeless with Surplus Food be Profitable? Jasmine Crowe is Betting on It.

by Paul Shapiro 

Sep 15, 2019 | EPisode 25

More About Niyati Gupta

For a lot of people, when they walk by someone who’s homeless, their inclination may be to look the other way. One day for Jasmine Crowe, however, she not only didn’t look the other way; she saw a profitable business opportunity in helping connect the hungry with perfectly good food the rest of us are throwing away.

Sound like a pipedream? Well, today many major food users, including the NFL, the Atlanta airport, and Netflix pay the startup Jasmine founded to take their unsold food and deliver it to the hungry. And it turns out, thanks to federal tax law, it’s profitable not only for Jasmine’s company, but for those corporations paying to have their unwanted food go to the homeless, too.

Resources discussed in this episode

Jasmine’s company: Goodr

Jasmine’s TEDx talk: Hunger is not a question of scarcity

So far, Jasmine’s company Goodr has diverted more than two million pounds of food from landfills and into the stomachs of the homeless—all profitably. In this episode, we talk with Jasmine about her business model and how it’s helping the hungry while protecting the planet at the same time. 

Jasmine on Oprah’s Super Soul: Everyone Deserves A Meal

Books that have influenced Jasmine: Good to Great and Blue Ocean Strategy