An Interview With Martita Mestey
Invest in yourself. A startup is expensive both in time and money, and a founder must be willing to make both financial and time commitments. As a self-funded startup, and as a founder that has continues to work as an attorney full time while developing Recelery, I have had to allocate my time and resources to make Recelery a reality.
It has been estimated that each year, more than 100 billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States. That equates to more than $160 billion worth of food thrown away each year. At the same time, in many parts of the United States, there is a crisis caused by people having limited access to healthy & affordable food options. The waste of food is not only a waste of money and bad for the environment, but it is also making vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.
Authority Magazine started a new series called “How Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies and Food Companies Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste.” In this interview series, we are talking to leaders and principals of Restaurants, Grocery Stores, Supermarkets, Hospitality Companies, Food Companies, and any business or nonprofit that is helping to eliminate food waste, about the initiatives they are taking to eliminate or reduce food waste.
As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Daniel Abrams, Co-Founder of Recelery.
Daniel Abrams is the Co-Founder of Recelery, a new pantry tracking mobile app that limits food waste by keeping food inventoried and allowing the home cook to sell what they are not able to use. In addition to being a Co-Founder of Recelery, Daniel is a corporate attorney focusing his practice on mergers and acquisitions. A passionate home cook, he developed the idea for Recelery from his personal experiences in not knowing what was in his pantry, tossing out too much-untouched food, and never having all the ingredients for a recipe.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
The journey started five years ago while I was in law school. I had just moved into my first apartment and started grocery shopping for myself. As an avid home cook, I enjoyed buying fresh produce to incorporate into my meals. I quickly learned, however, that I could not cook or eat the produce fast enough, and would end up throwing away much of what I had just bought.
After throwing away far too much fresh produce, I thought to myself, there must be a way to share my pantry items with my neighbors so that I can use the exact amount I need and sell the rest.
I began researching whether anything existed, and realized that there was nothing that fit exactly what I was looking for. Other marketplaces existed, but nothing was geared towards perishable food items.
At the time, I was finishing up my third year of law school and was starting to study for the bar exam, so I had to put the idea onto the backburner. As soon as I passed the bar exam and started practicing law, I refocused my energy on the project.
The first iteration of Recelery was a WordPress website with only a grocery marketplace. It was a trial run for how I envisioned the app working, but realized that Recelery would not work well as only a website, it needed to be a mobile app.
It was not until two years later that my brother, and Co-Founder, Michael, encouraged me to reach out to coders to create the first iteration of Recelery. Soon after that, Recelery was born.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company or organization?
I was at an inflection point with Recelery. We had good traction with users engaging with Recelery, but I wanted to reach a broader audience. The idea was to incorporate a feature into the app so that users would be able to save money while using Recelery. Eventually, I was able to connect with an entrepreneur who had developed websites utilizing this cost saving measure, to discuss whether this idea was feasible or worthwhile in growing the user base.
As soon as we started talking, he said “you may not like what you are about to hear, your idea won’t work.” So often in the startup space we are encouraged to take the risk, but this founder’s honest answer was greatly appreciated. It was through this conversation that I was able to refocus my attention on Recelery’s existing food waste-reducing features.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
When I first started pitching Recelery to friends and family, I had put together a slide deck describing Recelery and its functionality. I sent the pitch deck around and then did the pitch. My Dad called me an hour later and said that “the pitch went great, except you misspelled Recelery on one of the last slides.” Of all the slides, it was also the one slide that I went back to after the presentation to discuss further, so anyone who did not catch the spelling error the first time certainly was able to see it the second time.
At the time I was horrified, but of all the mistakes I have made working on Recelery, it is the one I can laugh about now and I learned a valuable lesson: “proofread everything.”
How do you define “Leadership”? Can you explain what you mean or give an example?
Leadership is a person’s ability to help guide others in reaching a unified goal. Recelery started as a passion project that has turned into an exciting mobile app. To make Recelery a reality, I needed to engage with coders, marketing teams, PR teams and others. Each partner has looked to me to be the leader in determining the overall direction we want to head, and I rely on my partners to implement the strategy to reach the goal of making Recelery the go to pantry management app and grocery marketplace.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take” by Wayne Gretzky. With everything, when an opportunity presents itself, I take it. After college, but before law school, I was fortunate enough to be able to live at home, and anytime a job opportunity presented itself, I would take it. I worked in sales, and as an office assistant, a gardener, and rowing coach. As a founder, I took this mentality to launch Recelery. I had an opportunity to work with coders to develop the app, and decided that this was likely the one time to do it. If I did not take the shot to start Recelery, I would have looked back with regret for not going for it.
OK, thank you for all of that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition of terms so that all of us are on the same page. What exactly are we talking about when we refer to food waste?
To me, food waste occurs when edible food is thrown away before consumption. Food waste occurs at each stage of the supply chain, from a farmer throwing away food that is imperfect, food spoiling before hitting grocery store shelves, and food thrown away after purchase but before consumption.
Food waste not only occurs when a consumer throws away items purchased from the grocery store, but also occurs when throwing away leftovers, and when a restaurant throws away uneaten food.
Food waste even exists when canned items sit on a pantry shelf for years. Although it may not be “food waste” it is “wasted food”. A neighbor may need that pantry item to complete a recipe, cannot afford the fees for grocery delivery or doesn’t have easy transportation to the nearest grocery store. Food that is not being utilized can have the effect of being food waste.
Can you help articulate a few of the main causes of food waste?
One of the main causes of food waste is that no matter how quickly food reaches the grocery store shelves, certain items such as lettuce, Swiss chard, and other leafy greens, expire before consumption. Another main cause is the packaging of food. It is far more cost effective to package food in larger quantities than in small packages. It makes sense to buy three peppers in a single package then individual peppers when the cost for the three is less than buying one. As a result, consumers often buy more than they could reasonably consume.
What are a few of the obstacles that companies and organizations face when it comes to distributing extra or excess food? What can be done to overcome those barriers?
A major obstacle for companies trying to distribute excess food is that consumers may not trust that the product being purchased from the distributor is of the same quality as that being purchased from a grocery store. Trust can be established by consumers having positive experiences buying and using redistributed food products. With each positive experience, consumers will gain the trust needed to make such redistribution of food common place.
Another obstacle is distributing the excess food prior to such foods’ expiration. Because the timeframe for redistributing fresh produce is relatively short, companies would need fast responding infrastructure to receive the food and redistribute it to those in need. To overcome this, technologies can be developed to assist in extending the shelf life of perishable foods.
Can you describe a few of the ways that you or your organization are helping to reduce food waste?
Recelery has easy to use features that allow users to manage their grocery lists and inventory their pantries. Once a user logs a pantry item, Recelery gives the user reminders to consume that food item before it expires. By providing frequent reminders, and visually seeing the “use by” date of an item, Recelery encourages users to consume food before the item goes to waste.
In addition to the pantry management features, Recelery is a grocery marketplace that connects buyers and sellers within a 1 mile radius. If a user bought too much of anything or simply wants to resell an item before it expires, users can easily add items to the marketplace so that neighbors and others in their community can repurchase the item. Recelery’s marketplace extends the supply chain beyond grocery stores, and turns every pantry into a shoppable store.
Another feature of Recelery is the sharing of users’ pantries. By opening a pantry to friends’ and family, Recelery’s pantry share is the first place users will go to see if the item they are looking for is sitting in their friends pantries.
With Recelery, users can shop smarter, live more sustainably, and significantly reduce food waste.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help address the root of this problem?
Food waste is not just an “individual” problem, but a community and societal issue. To tackle the problem, community/society/politicians can:
- Create awareness of the food waste problem through education. Educational courses can be in a formal setting such as a classroom, but can also be through experiential courses such as growing food in a community garden. By learning about where food comes from and the arduous process of getting food to the grocery store, people will be encouraged to reduce their food waste.
- Establish programs so that the food chain does not end at the dinner table. Food that is unconsumed can be recycled into animal feed and compost. Although programs do exist to accomplish these goals, to significantly reduce waste, the programs should be implemented on a larger scale.
- Fund farming centers within major urban areas to decrease the distance from farm to store to table. With today’s technology, vertical farming allows food to be grown indoors and in major cities. The cost to establish these centers is typically high. By providing funding to establish vertical farms within communities, the supply line from farm to table is shortened, which would reduce food waste.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why. Please share a story or example for each.
- Seek out mentors for different stages of development. When Recelery was first in development, we found mentors that provided insight into the early stage development of a mobile app. After Recelery reached a stage in development where it was time to market and reach an audience, we found new mentors who were experienced in this area. Each stage of Recelery’s growth had unique challenges, and we needed to seek out different mentors with experience in advising on each new challenge.
- Mistakes are merely learning experiences. I have made countless mistakes throughout the growth of Recelery, but each time I made a mistake, I pushed myself to find the lesson in that mistake. I have treated everything with Recelery’s growth as a learning opportunity, and although mistakes are discouraging, Recelery would not be the app today without those mistakes.
- Invest in yourself. A startup is expensive both in time and money, and a founder must be willing to make both financial and time commitments. As a self-funded startup, and as a founder that has continues to work as an attorney full time while developing Recelery, I have had to allocate my time and resources to make Recelery a reality.
- Just because they love your idea doesn’t mean they will invest. Although this sounds silly, we read about startups that get funded just on the idea alone. It may happen, but far more often, investors want to see a company reach certain metrics before making the investment. It is important to pitch early and often, but I learned early on not to be discouraged if the feedback was “we love the idea, let us know when you are farther along.”
- Don’t be afraid to pivot. The look of the app you first create will not be the final version, and additional features may be required to attract a larger audience. Recelery started out as a WordPress website that was a grocery marketplace. I soon realized that such a platform was not right to accomplish my goals and a marketplace by itself would be very challenging to bring in a large audience. Recelery pivoted to become a mobile application, with additional features such as pantry management, shared pantries, and a grocery list.
Are there other leaders or organizations who have done good work to address food waste? Can you tell us what they have done? What specifically impresses you about their work? Perhaps we can reach out to them to include them in this series.
In 2018, Kroger created its Zero Hunger I Zero Waste Foundation. The Foundation has engaged with communities to reduce hunger and food waste, and through its innovation fund, has invested in startup companies that work towards reducing food waste. As the largest grocery store chain, Kroger has the size and influence to make a direct impact on reducing hunger and food waste.
Imperfect Foods is another leading organization that was designed to address food waste. Imperfect Foods explains that its “produce selection celebrates quirky looks and odd shapes, prevents food waste, and provides farmers with additional revenue.”
Too Good To Go is an inspirational app, as they have created a movement to reduce food waste by connecting businesses with extra food to consumers. As mentioned on its website “The Too Good To Go app lets customers buy and collect Surprise Bags of food — at a great price — directly from businesses.”
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I find education to be fundamentally important for each child in this country and education has a far-reaching impact. I would love to inspire a movement where people “adopt a class” and help cover the adopted classes needs for the school year. If that class needs pencils, paper, art supplies, mentorship, and even class lunches, then the adopter would help cover those expenses. With enough people adopting classes, thousands of students would reap the benefits and teachers would no longer need to buy supplies for their classes.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would love to have lunch with Brad Leone. He is a remarkable chef and YouTube personality who has inspired me to go beyond my cooking comfort level and try new things. His YouTube series also touches on reducing food waste, with episodes mostly on fermentation, which extends the shelf life of perishable food.
With so much experience in the food space, I would love to hear his thoughts on how technology can help reduce food waste, as well as how his travels have influenced his perspective on food consumption and waste in the United States.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
@recelery on Twitter
Recelery.com
This was very meaningful, thank you so much, and we wish you only continued success.
Reducing Food Waste: Daniel Abrams Of Recelery On How They Are Helping To Eliminate Food Waste was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.