Hero Highlight: Afresh

Companies and Leaders, Doing Right By Their Customers and Employees

Supply chain efficiencies have been disrupted and grocery stores are deeply affected. Companies are having to pivot, innovate, and get creative. Some are leading by example. Each week at reachXOD, we highlight companies who are going above and beyond to connect to their employees and customers during a time of uncertainty. Afresh caught our attention. This rapidly growing company is using innovative algorithms to help avoid excess food being put into landfills. Here’s their story. Take note. 

Afresh is reimagining the fresh food supply chain to eliminate waste. Connection, community, and health have never been more important. We’re celebrating companies like Afresh and leaders like Matt Schwartz, CEO who are demonstrating bold decision making, creative thinking, problem solving, and resiliency. Not only do they deserve recognition, but they also provide context to real life business strategies that you and your company can model. 

Founded by three Stanford grads, Matt Schwartz, Nathan Fenner, and Volodymyr Kuleshov, Afresh was created after the founders realized how much food was truly going to waste. They went out to determine how technology could reduce food waste. Afresh, started in 2016, attacks the food spoiling problem with AI and specific algorithms developed to analyze and detect inefficiencies in ordering. Grocery store staffers input inventory each day and the learning algorithms calculate how much of each product they should order. The goal was to help reduce spoilage while also ensuring that the store stocks enough food to meet the demand. 

The company’s mission is delivering sustainable, accessible, fresh food to all and fighting the 18 million dollars in food waste that is thrown out each year. Fenner, COO, attacks real world problems with out of the box technology solutions. He’s been known to develop some pretty far out engineering solutions! As CTO, Kuleshov is passionate about bringing technology to the forefront of important societal problems like food waste in order to improve human and environmental health. The company’s CEO, Schwartz, is a leader to watch. He’s pulled a team together to optimize AI technologies, improve data-driven decision making, and modernize the technology data stack--to solve big problems in food supply chain. Schwartz says he has an “appetite for impact”, and it is evident in the tenacity in which they are attacking fresh food sustainability. 

At reachXOD, we admire Afresh as a business, a brand and their mission as a company. As a data-driven company ourselves, we can’t help but admire their tremendous success in solving a problem that affects us all. Take initiative. Be proactive and transparent. Be human. Look for the heroes. Learn from their journeys. 

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