This Social Entrepreneur Wants Americans to Waste Less Food

Every day before lunch, as a boy growing up in Syria, Maen Mahfoud and his brother would ride their bicycles around the neighborhood to deliver meals to relatives and neighbors who were sick or out working. Hungry and exhausted by the midday heat, they resented the task.

“It was annoying, but we had to do it every day. Sharing food was essential, and we had to make sure our neighbors were all fed before we could have lunch,” said Mahfoud, who joined the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs in January as the Sugarman Practitioner in Residence at the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavior Science and Public Policy.

Fast forward to Mahfoud living in the Bay Area as an adult, where he saw tech companies serving abundant free food in their cafeterias. Much of what wasn’t eaten was tossed out, while people went hungry in encampments across the street. Mahfoud decided to take matters in his own hands, connecting with a tech-focused catering startup to take their leftover food to local community organizations.

“The caterer who was giving food to the client at that time said, ‘Is that what you do – move food around? Because we can use that,’” he recalled.

And so Mahfoud launched Replate, which helps businesses donate surplus meals to places such as senior centers, low-income housing units, soup kitchens, and shelters. The company has a tech platform it uses to manage logistics, partnering with DoorDash and food recovery organizations to identify drivers who can pick up and deliver food. It also helps clients track the environmental impact of food recovery so they can report it as part of their ESG (environmental, social, and governance) strategies.

Since launching 10 years ago, Replate has expanded throughout the United States with clients that include Netflix, CommonSpirit Health, the San Francisco International Airport, and the University of California San Francisco.

Mahfoud explains what the startup does as “reverse catering.” When businesses order food for, say, a lunch, they pay the caterer money to transport the food and set it up. Similarly, he says companies should pay for the logistics involved in recovering surplus food so that it can be consumed by others rather than added to a landfill. Numerous states – including Maryland, New Hampshire, New Jersey, and Washington – are starting to mandate that commercial businesses divert organic waste from landfills, but Mahfoud says there is a lack of clear national strategy.

“Businesses and people think of recycling as a service,” Mahfoud said. “Food rescue has always been perceived as a charity. We are trying to change that norm and professionalize the industry.”

That’s what brings Mahfoud to Princeton. During the yearlong appointment, he plans to dive into the behavioral science that drives how people perceive food waste. 

While Replate is primarily focused on what happens to food at the end of its life cycle, Mahfoud wants to develop mechanisms to help food service providers make better decisions throughout the process of ordering, acquiring, and disseminating food – including buying the right amount of food to reduce waste at the onset. 

“You have to zoom out and try to understand how to fix a system that is encouraging mass production, low value, quantity over quality. That's why I think we need to start changing the inputs and not just focus on the outputs,” he said. “I believe we can help businesses make the right decisions upstream.”

Mahfoud hopes that providing food businesses information such as the climate impact, nutrition, and source of ingredients will help them choose, for example, to add lentils to a chili to reduce how much beef is in it – or to buy from local farms for fresher, more nutritious produce that isn’t responsible for carbon emissions while being transported from another country. Such individual choices could collectively have a big impact, Mahfoud explains.

“What we want to investigate this year is a decision mechanism that can actually influence decisions to be better for the environment and for the people,” he said. “Food waste is solvable.”

For students who are interested in working on food systems, Mahfoud calls it a space ripe for exploring. He encourages research on how food connects to well-being, productivity, and health. 

“We need more social entrepreneurs,” he said. “We need people who can frame problems differently.”

Photo courtesy of Maen Mahfoud.