Feeding Forward Gives Back With On-Demand Mobile App

Feeding Forward, an on-demand mobile app, is trying to disrupt the way leftover food is handled in America.

Founded in 2013 by 25-year-old Komal Ahmad, who is also the CEO of the nonprofit service, the company is looking to expand its “on-demand food recovery” service, which collects leftovers from events and redistributes them to homeless shelters.

Since the launch of its service in the San Francisco Bay Area, the company has so far recovered more than 684,000 pounds of food, which fed more than 570,000 people and diverted 3.42 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions from landfills, according to CNET.

“Imagine a football stadium filled to its brim,” Ahmad said. “That’s how much food goes wasted every single day in America.”

So what inspired Ahmad to build the service-based app? In an interview with CNET, she recalled meeting a 26-year-old homeless man who had been on deployments twice but still couldn’t make his ends meet and had to beg for the very basic necessities.

“It just blew my mind,” she said.

In 2012, Ahmad collaborated with a developer and won the Angelhack Silicon Valley hackathon.

Thinking of the excessive food the country wastes and the sheer number of people in need of support for food, one might think that making the process run smoothly is just stacking columns on a spreadsheet, but that wasn’t the case for Ahmad.

She recalls picking up 500 sandwiches from a dining hall service in Berkeley but not finding a single homeless shelter willing to accept.

“It was me on the side of the road, so frustrated and so upset,” Ahmad said. “There’s no lack of people who are in need of food. This is not a hunger issue. This is a distribution issue.”

And thus the idea to develop an app to better allocate the resources was born. Ahmad plans to expand the company’s service to other cities in the Bay Area, Boston and Seattle.

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