“How a Pioneering entrepreneur built a food recovery business model based on maximizing tax donation incentives and the guarantee of safe food.”
Interview with Bill Reighard, President and Founder, Food Donation Connection
The Accelerator Expert Network Knowledge Series highlights interviews with members of the ReFED Nonprofit Food Recovery Accelerator's Expert Network, representing a diverse group of food businesses, capital providers, government agencies, technology companies and food systems subject matter experts. Given the Accelerator's aim to catalyze ideas and inspire actions that will lead to a doubling of healthy food available to the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity, a new interview from an Expert Network member will be released each week throughout the course of the 3-month program, running from September - December, 2019. Each interview can be downloaded here.
In this week's interview, we hear from Bill Reighard, President and Founder of Food Donation Connection (FDC), who spent a long career with PepsiCo, overseeing Asia operations for retailers like Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. When the executive team at Pizza Hut told him about an idea for donating leftover prepared food to food recovery agencies, he was immediately intrigued. Bill tested this model with Pizza Hut and now, over 25 years later, FDC has coordinated the donation of more than 550 million pounds of quality prepared food in 24 countries. Built on a business model that maximizes tax donation incentives and pays critical attention to food safety, FDC is planning to continue pursing business opportunities with new partners interested in establishing or improving upon their existing current food donation program.
Alexandria Coari from ReFED and Amy Ahearn from +Acumen (an Accelerator Program Partner) sat down with Bill to discuss how FDC continuously iterates and improves their food recovery business model, and to hear his advice for other organizations in the food recovery space.
Download the full interview here!
The full interview can be downloaded here. Be sure to follow along as we release additional interviews with our Expert Network members as part of the Accelerator Expert Network Knowledge Series.