Toast partners with ReFED to fund Catalytic Grant Fund

Toast, a Boston-based all-in-one technology platform built for restaurants, has announced product and philanthropic investments in the fight against food waste.

Inefficiencies in the U.S. food system result in nearly 40 percent of the country’s food supply going unsold or uneaten. And, with approximately 13 million tons of food waste generated across the food service industry in the United States which mostly comes from restaurants, tackling food waste in restaurants is key to addressing this issue and reducing the cost of goods sold. 

ReFED and Toast partner

Toast’s $1 million partnership with ReFED, a Long Island City, New York-based nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste in the U.S., will serve as an anchor fund partner for the second open call of the ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund, which provides organizations with recoverable and nonrecoverable grants to derisk and scale high-impact solutions to reduce food waste across the food system. This partnership will allow Toast and ReFED to explore opportunities to systemically reduce food waste at restaurants with a multiphased grants program, starting with an initial open call for food waste solution providers and organizations across the restaurant industry to apply for funding.

A subset of grantees will be selected to pilot their food waste innovations with restaurants with a goal of developing solutions that can be scaled to support industrywide impact. Each participating restaurant will be custom-matched with a solution that best meets the restaurant's individual needs and priorities. These pilots, expected to take place in the summer and fall of 2024, will provide small to medium-sized restaurants a chance to be at the forefront of fighting food waste with Toast and ReFED while also creating cost-saving opportunities and positive environmental and social impact.

“There is a huge opportunity to reduce food waste in the restaurant industry, and we’re excited to partner with Toast.org to support solution providers that are driving meaningful impact,” ReFED Executive Director Dana Gunders says. “This is a major investment that will enable us to pilot new technologies and innovations that can benefit the entire restaurant community, and Toast can help provide resources and education for food waste reduction to a network of the food industry that is otherwise hard to reach.”

Toast's Food Waste Reduction technology

Toast is launching Food Waste Reduction (FWR), a set of features available to all Toast customers at no additional cost designed to help restaurants measure and manage food waste in their operations while saving money. Toast.org, the company’s social impact arm, will bolster its commitment to creating a more sustainable food ecosystem with a $1 million partnership with ReFED in support of its Catalytic Grant Fund to advance food waste solutions.

“Food waste is one of many challenges restaurants navigate daily as they seek to stretch every dollar and crumb,” Toast co-founder and Chief Technical Officer Jonathan Grimm says. “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.”

Toast’s FWR feature set equips restaurants with actionable tools to increase visibility into contributors to food waste and turn insights to action with cost-saving strategies, such as resale and diversion tactics and more. FWR will allow restaurants to:

• log, categorize, and quantify unsold items with a cloud-based food waste tracker;
• use insights and data to optimize daily operations with food waste reporting; and
• learn and develop actionable cost-saving strategies with the Food Waste Educational Hub.

“Toast’s Food Waste Reduction has been a great feature enhancement for our cafes. The tools have made for easy tracking of food waste, simplifying the previous manual tracking process and giving visibility to both production and cost savings opportunities to our franchise operators,” Paris Baguette Vice President of Information Technology Massimo Mallozzi says. “Individual team leaders and staff are all empowered to input and categorize waste while also giving both franchise owners and management visibility into food waste trends and insights in one place on the Toast platform.”