Social Impact Tech: Maen Mahfoud of Replate On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
At its core, Replate is on a mission to reduce food waste, alleviate food insecurity and mitigate climate change in communities everywhere. Replate leverages data, artificial intelligence, and agile programming to recover surplus food from vendors and deliver it directly to nonprofit organizations in the area. While we collectively work toward this goal, we have the opportunity to work with incredible nonprofits that provide services to break these cycles of poverty and work to change the systems that create and perpetuate those cycles.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing industry leaders who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Maen Mahfoud.
After immigrating to the US from Syria, Maen Mahfoud was shocked to witness people around him digging through trash cans and struggling to find a meal, and was inspired to make a change. Maen could see that food waste is a solvable problem and that what people consider “waste” is oftentimes still nutritious and wholesome food. He began reaching out to companies himself and picking up their surplus food and donating it to nearby nonprofits, thus launching Replate in 2016.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
The idea behind Replate was actually inspired by my childhood in the Middle East. Growing up in Syria, my mom used to cook us huge lunches and, before anyone touched the food, she would ask my older brother and I to get on our bikes and distribute some of that food to our community. We brought meals to our neighbors who were facing challenges or had partners outside of the country or who were working in construction. Later in life, I immigrated to the United States and was devastated to see the level of food insecurity here.
*Replate/Maen to provide additional insight
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
One of the stories that comes to mind is when I started Replate. In the early days, I was the only person pitching the product to restaurants and catering companies. I was also the driver that moves the food from the business to the shelters or the soup kitchen. I was also the person who worked on the platform, built the website, form requests, and all of that. One day, I was doing a pickup at a company called OpenDNS, which is part of Cisco in San Francisco. I am driving the car and I’m on the phone with another client, selling them Replate as a service for their office.
I was dispatching during my ride, sending them the drop-off locations with my hands on the phone, selling Replate to another office, while also driving to an office to pick up food and take it to the shelter. I was doing all that while I’m driving by Embarcadero Street here in San Francisco. Suddenly, I got stopped by a cop and I had to pull over while I was on the phone.
The person on the phone heard the cop talking to me and the siren going off and I said “Sorry, I have to hang up!” Funny enough, I told the cop the issue. He was going to write me a ticket, but I explained what I was doing and he was extremely sympathetic. I was very excited to see that he did not give me a ticket. He just said “Don’t do that again, promise me.” Then, I called the client again and told the client the story. They said “Alright, sign me up. I got you. I got you, bro.” That was an incredible story. That kept pushing me, seeing the people around me pushing me to do this work.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
When I first started Replate, I was handling the pick-ups by myself. Soon, I realized I couldn’t do them all independently. There would be three scheduled at a time, for instance. So I began recruiting Uber and Lyft drivers to assist, along with Instacart. I would ride along on these drives and pitch Replate, attempting to convince them to work for me even though Replate didn’t exist yet. I told them I had an established company when there was honestly no entity at all. It was me! Somehow, it worked. They liked the idea, they were driving anyway, and it helped me to launch my business. There was often dead times after lunch pickups, and that was the perfect segue for these drivers to help me deliver our surplus meals. They’d get more hours for their trips. After a few months of doing ride-along pickups, I was approached by a funder. They were very interested in my work. I had a few meetings with associates, then finally with the CEO of the investment firm. The investor asked me a question about safety because his company had retail experience in food service. He asked me about the safety procedures of our pickups, and how the drivers and myself were handling the food. He replied, “Oh that’s interesting. Are you happy potentially killing people because of your practices? You need to clean up your operations.” He passed on the pitch, and said, “There’s no way we’ll fund you.” It was a big blow. Not only was there no encouragement, but there was also almost an accusation or question of my character. Nevertheless, it was helpful in pushing me to think about the whole process, and to hire someone who could manage food handling — it turned out to be Katie, who’s currently our COO. We immediately went to get food certification and training for all our drivers. After a year of that, the same CEO came back and funded us for three years. It was great to see how harsh feedback can be tough, but if you have conviction, it can also push you in the right direction.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
This is from my dad, actually. He always told us: “Put yourself in someone’s shoes.” I know it’s simple, perhaps even cliche, but I think it’s important whenever you’re passing judgment or observing a situation to consider what you would have done had you been in that position. How would you react or amend your behavior? We don’t know what someone’s life is like, where they live, what they’ve been through. Be patient. I’m often impatient, and it’s been hard to understand this concept. But it’s important to remember everyone has a challenge and may be dealing with something beyond our knowledge. It’s important to live this way.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
● Not afraid of asking the right people for support
● Determined/proactive and hard working
● Get outside the building and be able to connect things together
Some of the main characteristics that I feel have helped me with my journey was to knock on doors and not being afraid to ask for help, especially from people who are experts in their fields. I highly encourage entrepreneurs not to just sit down and strategize in their office and have meetings in their co-working spaces. I highly recommend getting outside of the building and knocking on doors and meeting the clients. Get them coffee, invite them for lunch, invite them for dinner, look into your network, your first network, your second, your third, and mutual friends.
Be out there, meet with them and ask them for advice. Always be good at listening, and execute. Don’t wait, get things done as fast as possible. It’s always more impactful when you get it done rather than waiting. Start now and don’t wait. Meet the right people, rather than just sitting down. I highly appreciate and value being outside and meeting people.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on the planet and the environment. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
Each year, an estimated one-third of all food produced — equivalent to 1.3 billion tons worth around $1 trillion — ends up rotting in the trash of consumers and retailers, or spoiling due to poor transportation and harvesting practices. At its core, Replate is on a mission to reduce food waste, alleviate food insecurity and mitigate climate change in communities everywhere. Replate leverages data, artificial intelligence, and agile programming to recover surplus food from vendors and deliver it directly to nonprofit organizations in the area. While we collectively work toward this goal, we have the opportunity to work with incredible nonprofits that provide services to break these cycles of poverty and work to change the systems that create and perpetuate those cycles.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Replate’s technology provides a seamless solution for businesses to not only track their impact transparently, but also to request pickups regularly or on-demand so they can manage their surplus food, learn from their waste, and try to move towards source reduction. Replate is a B2B tech platform that allows food suppliers to track the delivery of rescued food, and also its social and environmental metrics like pounds of food recovered, meals created, which nonprofits benefited, and how much carbon dioxide and water were saved in the food system.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
After moving to California, I would literally see someone across the street from the Twitter building in San Francisco digging in a trash can looking for a sandwich that he put together to eat. This led me to reflect on my childhood and the unconditional support my family would give to our community. Why can’t we find solutions for people who are in need of food? Replate was founded in 2016, and we began moving food from campuses, dining centers and local restaurants, and delivering it into shelters and soup kitchens, and encampments. I soon realized that food rescue was not only significantly benefiting the lives of so many, but also had a positive impact on the environment. When we throw our food in the trash, it emits methane and CO2 and contributes to climate change.
How do you think this might change the world?
We envision a world where nothing expires. The population is growing, conflict is increasing, and many of these challenges affect our potential to grow food and feed everyone. Replate hopes to create an infrastructure to maintain a circular economy for surplus food to address food insecurity. Instead of trying to produce more food, let’s repurpose what we have in the most transparent, scalable, and efficient way possible. At the end of the day, we should always keep in mind the person, and families, experiencing food insecurity. With the dual benefit of supporting the community and fighting climate change, I hope to be a part of this positive change in the world.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
Definitely. All technology has the potential to be incredibly impactful in a positive way, but also has the potential to leave negative consequences on people. One of the challenges with our technologies is, especially as it becomes more profit-driven, is the question of whether we’re going to help encourage businesses to get more pickups and use our platform more to rescue food or if we are going to try to help them reduce food waste by giving them the right tools to use it.
One example of this is when we were working with a business for about two years and they were one of our biggest clients. They paid us for breakfast, lunch, and dinner pickups on a daily basis for three floors. After working with them for a year and a half, we helped them get outside of our service because now they’re so smart with what they’re ordering that they don’t waste as much food.
We lost them as a client. However, we did act on our mission to help them with their food waste strategies and become a more sustainable business. This is one incident. Another incident is as we’re creating better technology, our matching algorithm that helps connect the food donor with the food recipient and the driver or the food rescuer. A lot of optimization problems can be done to help connect the closest driver to the donor location. However, most of our businesses that donate food are in major cities like San Francisco, LA, and New York. A lot of people experiencing food insecurity or low-income food rescue drivers are not close to that area. So, how do we actually tinker and iterate on our matching algorithm to be able to be inclusive of food rescuers, give them jobs, and give them pickups outside of that radius?
That’s another potential bad effect that can come up from that technology. However, I think being clear about the mission and the vision of your company, and having integrity and transparency into your operations, always takes you to the right place.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?
● Focus on value creation, not money or profit
● Knock on doors and ask for help
● Don’t be afraid to take risks in the beginning
● Tie your work/impact with something relatable to people and short-term
● Be able to sell your product, if you can. That means people love it and willing to spend money on it
I think about five main things have helped me to make a positive impact. Some people say just being nice and being empathetic, but I think of two main things.
Don’t sit and try to fundraise for an idea for that thing you think is going to save the world, but rather go dig in, do it yourself, learn from it, and then create that value that you think is there. You might create a startup or a social enterprise. A lot of people will challenge you. How are you gonna make money out of that? I don’t see how you’re going to make a profit and how you’re going to sustain the business or make it financially viable. I think you should ignore that and focus on creating value for the customers or the clients, in this case, people experiencing food insecurity or businesses who don’t know what to do with their surplus food or their leftover food. Once you create that value, money comes after. So focus on value creation, not money, money comes later.
Be obsessed with your work, let people love it, and be able to sell it. If you’re able to sell it, you’re able to grow it, then that means people love it and you’re doing the right job. So, I think these are the two main things and you can read about the rest. Mainly like when you talk about the impact and social enterprise, don’t talk about events that might happen years from now. Talk about things that are relatable to daily life. Food inflation is something people think about rather than climate change at the moment because it doesn’t affect them directly. Think of things that are short-term relatable to clients that will make them care more, that will stick with them.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I would tell them that the world can’t wait. You hear about food shortages, conflicts in Ukraine and Russia, food inflation, pandemics, recessions, and droughts. I don’t want to be pessimistic, but this is the reality of the world. So this is the future. This is the job of the future. How do we keep the growing population fed? How can we keep them healthy? And start to think in a circularity, in green practices, in regenerative agriculture, and repurposed food. There are countries that export so much of their food and waste so much of it. How can you repurpose that? This is the job of the future. Not only because it is timely, but because it is extremely rewarding to wake up every morning knowing that you’re making the world a better place, making people live better. You’re saving the environment, but also it becomes even more fun when you start to problem solve with curiosity and bring intelligent people around to actually figure out these solutions. That is extremely rewarding.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
I would meet Elon Musk for lunch, dinner, coffee, whatever. Despite some of the controversy that may surround him, he is an incredible person. It’s fascinating to me to observe such a self-starter, he’s behind so many international start-ups — PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, etc. This whole movement around electric vehicles — Elon is leading the charge. He can do so much by himself, but he also opened the door for others and inspired innovation in the clean energy space. He’s pragmatic and he gets shit done. Please tag him in this! I’d love to meet him.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can follow us on Instagram @replateyourmeal, Replate on LinkedIn, or learn more at replate.org.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Maen Mahfoud of Replate On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.