In 2013, Jasmine Crowe was driving through downtown Atlanta when she came across hundreds of homeless people waiting outside a city shelter—including women and young children. “It was something I’d never seen before in my own city,” she recalls. “I said, ‘Hey, I want to do something.’”
Crowe was used to working with nonprofits. Since graduating college in 2005, she’d worked in public relations for the national basketball team based in Phoenix and started her own consultancy company to help pro sports players work with advocacy groups and nonprofits.
But witnessing the issue firsthand was a game changer.
“I knew I could keep watching or I could do something about it,” she says. “So I decided to do something.”
Crowe is now the founder of Goodr, the world’s first end-to-end technology company that connects restaurants with food shelters, ensuring food that would otherwise be wasted goes to people who need it.
But getting there was a roundabout journey.
Launching a Nationwide Movement with a Pop-Up
Crowe, 38, still remembers the first time she learned about people experiencing homelessness.
At eight years old, she accompanied her father, an Air Force pilot, on a trip to Washington, DC, where she saw people living on the streets. On the flight home to the military base near Wichita Falls, Texas, she began peppering him with questions. “I kept on asking, ‘Why do those people not have a house? That’s so unfair. What’s happening here?’” she recalls.
Homelessness is still an ongoing challenge in the United States. According to a February 2022 report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, over 326,000 people in the country experienced sheltered homelessness—whether in emergency shelters or other transitional housing—on a single night in 2021.
In Atlanta, Crowe decided to help homeless people the only way she knew how: by throwing a dinner party. While still managing her consultancy business for professional athletes and celebrities, Crowe launched a pop-up restaurant to feed people for free in downtown Atlanta on weekends. As opposed to creating a simple soup kitchen, she rented tables with chairs and linens, bought flower arrangements, played old-school R&B music, printed menus with five-course meals (including vegetarian options), and offered warm towels for washing hands and faces before meals. She called it Sunday Soul, and paid for everything herself. “I wanted people to feel like they were eating at a restaurant,” she says. “We called it dining with dignity.”
Soon, Crowe’s pop-up went viral. Someone took a video of Sunday Soul and posted it on social media, where the video quickly racked up millions of views. “I thought something was wrong with my app,” she recalls. “I woke up one morning to thousands of comments and friend requests. People were saying, ‘This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.’”
Crowe’s initiative was taking off—she would ultimately serve over 83,000 meals—but paying for the pop-ups and cooking all the food, while still running her company, was proving impossible. One night, while she was looking into how restaurants use their leftovers, she stumbled upon a shocking statistic: Up to 40 percent of the nation’s food supply is estimated to be wasted each year.
“Wasted food is the single largest category of material placed in municipal landfills and represents nourishment that could have helped feed families in need,” a 2021 report by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration states.
For Crowe, the revelation changed everything. “I was blown away by how much food was going to waste, yet so many people were going hungry,” she says. “It made me upset, and that’s when I decided this should be a business.”
How Goodr is Creating a New Way to End Hunger—and Waste
In 2017, Crowe quit her agency to found Goodr, a new way to reduce food waste and hunger.
The idea was simple: help restaurants that had leftovers connect with food shelters in need. Ordering takeout online was easy, so Crowe assumed that there would be a way to create an app that offered similar ease of use. She had no background in coding, but she watched some online videos and recruited a few engineers at Georgia Tech University to help her create a beta version of the app. When it was hardly more than an idea, she entered it into the local hackathon—and won first place. She then used the prize money to hire more people to build it out further. She did this repeatedly: entering competitions with prize money that she then reinvested in Goodr.
Creating the technology wasn’t the only issue. Restaurants, she discovered, worried they might be held liable if old food made people sick. Crowe quickly uncovered the national Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which ensured restaurants couldn’t be held liable if they donated food in good faith and met certain criteria.
Finally, Crowe pitched restaurants themselves. Working with a financial partner to navigate tax laws, she explained how businesses could get 30 percent of their annual taxes written off with food donations, while also reducing global emissions (due to reducing landfills) and helping feed people. She quickly got her first customer—a major television and media conglomerate—which was based in Atlanta. “An administrative assistant read about us on social media, called, and we started the beta program,” Crowe says. “We were off from there.”
Today, Goodr has a sophisticated network across the country. Restaurants visit the Goodr platform and enter the amount of food they have available for pickup, and the software calculates the number of meals it creates along with the estimated tax savings it will generate. A driver then picks up the food and delivers it to a shelter. So far, Goodr has served 30 million meals to people in need, diverted four million pounds of food from landfills, and delivered $6.3 million in tax deductions to partners.
Even more incredible, Crowe is continuing to grow the business while also raising a new baby.
“I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished, but I know there’s so much more to do,” she says. “My goal is to help end hunger.”
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This article was produced by WIRED Brand Lab on behalf of U.S. Bank.
