Rethinking Food Recovery

The Problem

Standardizing food recovery processes across multiple retail store locations is challenging. As an example, one of our customers has 900 stores in California and coordinates with hundreds of food recovery organizations across the state. Over time, this became operationally complex, burdensome and time consuming for our customer’s internal teams to manage.

Our Solution

Our customer integrated Divert’s reverse logistics platform to efficiently collect unsold products from all 900 California locations. Leveraging artificial intelligence and scanning technology, Divert subsequently sorted the products based on food donation guidelines. We collaborated with three Food Banks in the state - two of which are in the Central Valley, an area ranked among the highest in Food Hardship Rates in the USA - and handled distributing the sorted food to these donation centers, saving our customer time and money.

The Results

This customer is now donating 85% of their food products that were previously going to landfill in the state, resulting in over 10 million pounds of food donated to feeding people rather than going to waste.