Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 589. Unlocking Sustainable Impact: How HelloFresh is Tackling Hunger + Building Cross-Sector Collaborations - Jeff Yorzyk

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589. Unlocking Sustainable Impact: How HelloFresh is Tackling Hunger + Building Cross-Sector Collaborations - Jeff Yorzyk · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: And I'm Becky.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: And this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the good community.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: So let's get started, becky, what's happening?
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Hello John, hello Fresh, that's what's happening, that's what's going down today, and are we excited or what?
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I love that we can talk to HelloFresh today.
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: We've got the man kind of behind the curtain over there, because we love on this podcast trying to break down the walls.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: It was part of the reason why we started this.
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: After having our careers in nonprofit, we wanted more people to work together and to find ways that we can kind of help each other things that we know, learn and are passionate about and HelloFresh is totally doing this in the hunger space, and so it is an honor to talk to Jeff Jorzik today.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: He's the director of sustainability for HelloFresh US, and y'all know HelloFresh.
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: You probably get boxes.
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: There's probably one sitting on your doorstep.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: You need to go ahead and get that inside and get it on ice and everything.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: But they have a passion, clearly, for food, and the hunger crisis has risen sharply in the last two years and, according to recent data, it's affecting more than 34 million individuals, many of which are hidden in plain sight, and so it's a huge honor to have Jeff on the show today.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: He has over 20 years of experience in sustainability across a broad range of sectors.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: He's held leadership roles in both commercial and consulting companies.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: He's spanned program development, strategic management systems, product sustainability and lifecycle assessment.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: My friend, I don't even know what all of those are, but I can tell you that you've got a great big view of kind of how people work together and how we get things done around the world.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: But really specifically, as your director of sustainability at HelloFresh, you've overseen packaging, lifestyle management, operational and supply chain sustainability.
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: I can't even imagine supply chain at something like HelloFresh, and the regulatory compliance and permitting aspects too.
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: But what really piqued our interest about your story is that HelloFresh has this ongoing partnership with local food banks like Black Veterans for Social Justice and no Kid Hungry has really served as models for how to create sustainable impact, and y'all are providing more than 40,000 meals weekly.
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: I'm sure that number is always evolving and growing, but really powerful here.
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: And so also last summer you partner with no Kid Hungry via the 13 for 13 million campaign, raising awareness of the issue of childhood food insecurity and helping to drive support for more than 13 million kids who are affected.
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: So Jeff is here bringing all of his wisdom, bringing all of these areas that we're going to learn about today, but mainly how to unite passion, purpose, impact, all together.
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: We call it locking arms for impact, so we're so excited to be in this conversation with you today.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: Jeff, thanks for being here.
• 2:55
  Speaker 3: Right on.
• 2:56
  Speaker 3: Very happy to be here.
• 2:57
  Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: Yeah, such an honor.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: Well, I mean, catch us up.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: I've given you a little bit of your professional story, but we like to get to know, like little Jeff, like where did you come from?
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: What are the kind of the formative moments of your story that got you into this work that you're doing today?
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: Oh my goodness Gosh, where to even start for you.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: I grew up in Springfield, massachusetts, and found my way through, you know, the Northeast, went to college in Northeast and after graduating I took a cross-country trip with my best friend and I found myself in Colorado at one point in the mountains down in Southwest Colorado, and I had a pretty powerful moment up in the mountains just thinking to myself you know, how could I possibly do anything with my career other than to protect and preserve this?
• 3:41
  Speaker 3: And that really was a turning point.
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: You know I grew up fishing camping with my folks.
• 3:46
  Speaker 3: They like to do weekend canoe trips up in Vermont, and so it was sort of a natural progression for me in a lot of ways to just take this respect for the outdoors and ask myself how do I bring my career into that and into that love?
• 4:00
  Speaker 3: And I think a lot of people are taking those steps now.
• 4:04
  Speaker 3: You know I went into environmental sort of consulting and cleanup work originally and then, as sort of, I've started to ask myself more questions.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: I was actually on a hike up in the mountains in 1999.
• 4:18
  Speaker 3: It's kind of a long time ago, but I just wrote something in my journal like how do you get ahead of waste before it happens, like, how do you stop cleaning this stuff up?
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: And get to a point of sort of doing more good instead of less bad, so to speak.
• 4:33
  Speaker 3: And yeah, I found my way pretty quickly from that question to a graduate degree in business to trying to get to the front end of the equation and essentially stop waste before it happened.
• 4:45
  Speaker 3: I actually got my first job in sustainability consulting in 2003.
• 4:52
  Speaker 3: So found a needle in a haystack and stuck with it for quite a while, and now it's 22 years later and I'm really having a great time with it.
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: I've had an awesome opportunity over the years to really explore a number of avenues of the field, from what people call environmental management systems, where you're trying to wire these things into the business so people know the pieces they're supposed to know about our corporate goals around reducing food waste or creating social impact whatever those goals might be to very technical things like product lifecycle assessment and what is the carbon footprint of a brick of cream cheese?
• 5:31
  Speaker 3: Oh my God, things like that.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: That was the first study I ever did.
• 5:35
  Speaker 3: The questions that keep us up at night, yes, but you know really had the opportunity to spend quite a lot of time with the tools of sustainability, always knowing that I wanted to bring it to a large corporation and really work on having a sustained impact.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: Essentially, consulting is a great field.
• 5:55
  Speaker 3: I learned a lot there.
• 5:56
  Speaker 3: You impact a lot of different companies in different ways, but working for one company like HelloFresh we're a very, very large global organization the ability to have a large impact inside a very large global organization is really attractive and it's been a great opportunity.
• 6:15
  Speaker 3: I would say my career has been a series of great opportunities, to be honest, and I happen to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of them, and I've certainly done my best to maximize that wherever I can.
• 6:27
  Speaker 2: Well, it's not lost on me that how John Teed up HelloFresh and what they're doing to really not just provide food but making sure that there is an accountability to it, that it's fulfilling needs and in total alignment also tracks with what you're saying about your life and how you just sort of knew that Colorado was your place.
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: Ps, colorado is my place too.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: It is absolutely my happy place, and I love that you were able to see at such a formative age that you could spend your career and your life doing the thing that you're most passionate about.
• 7:06
  Speaker 2: And all I keep thinking is like lucky us that you were able to find this alignment with this incredible company, because 40 million meals is significant, and this podcast has spent a lot of time and a lot of episodes talking about the hunger crisis.
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: How are we attacking it?
• 7:26
  Speaker 2: How are we looking at long-term solutions?
• 7:30
  Speaker 2: I think about what FarmLink is doing with food waste, which, oh my gosh, if you two aren't partnering, I want to totally put your hands together and I just think that what you're saying is we all have a duty not only to the environment, but to each other and to community, and I would love to just go a little bit deeper on that and talk about HelloFresh's impact, and John mentioned how sharply the hunger crisis has risen.
• 7:57
  Speaker 2: I mean over 34 million people in the US that's like 10% of us, almost Right and I'm like how does HelloFresh see its role in addressing this crisis and like what are you all doing to sort of get those those, uh, those things in place?
• 8:17
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a great question, Thank you.
• 8:19
  Speaker 3: It evolved very organically, I would say.
• 8:22
  Speaker 3: Um, you know, HelloFresh is a 12 year old company now, so in many ways people still think we're a young company, although we've definitely grown quite large.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: But our vision as a company is to change the way people eat forever and I really we key back to that all the time because we we, of course, do things like get people back in their kitchen and learning to cook again and even teaching a lot of people to cook.
• 8:45
  Speaker 3: My own son learned to cook through HelloFresh and just learning knife skills and basic things and chopping.
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: But this social side of it we've always believed that this product democratizes food.
• 8:58
  Speaker 3: We really fight food deserts through home delivery.
• 9:01
  Speaker 3: We make a lot of things accessible to people in terms of exciting recipes, maybe even some new ingredients, some new cooking skills, things like that.
• 9:11
  Speaker 3: But then we start bringing that to different parts of the population and I would say right at the beginning of pandemic.
• 9:21
  Speaker 3: To tell a quick story, in probably April of pandemic, Our US headquarters is in Manhattan.
• 9:27
  Speaker 3: Our largest distribution center at the time was in Newark, New Jersey.
• 9:30
  Speaker 3: They were incredibly hard hit by the COVID virus and the pandemic and, honestly, my CEO reached out to me and he said figure out how to get food into the community and within probably less than a month we had created a meal kit for the food insecure.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: And I definitely would like to thank the different charity partners I work with, because they helped us.
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: So table to table in Newark especially really helped us to re-envision what a meal kit looks like for the food insecure.
• 10:00
  Speaker 3: So how do we use ingredients maybe that are a little bit more culturally blind in terms of cultural preferences?
• 10:07
  Speaker 3: How do we make it very easy to pack?
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: So we take a lot of the little tiny things out, put more food, take out the spice packets, some of these different things, and put more whole ingredients in there.
• 10:19
  Speaker 3: We did that and we reached out to the city of New York at the time, who's been a great partner for us actually, because at the time, you know, there weren't even a lot of volunteers available.
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: They were able to pull together volunteers and we set up this approach where HelloFresh designs the meals.
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: We create these meal kits, we source food against them and then we work with charities to essentially bring together volunteers, pack those kits and get them to the people who need the most in that community.
• 10:48
  Speaker 3: The city of Newark knew exactly where those individuals were and they literally brought them to their homes.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: So that's where all this started.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: We started doing about 16,000 meals a week at first, and one of the other things I will say that our charities brought to us is that this concept that hunger never sleeps and a program.
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: If you're really going to make a difference, you need to have a program that delivers every week.
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: It has to be there, it has to be dependable.
• 11:18
  Speaker 3: It can't be something you're just doing on a quarterly basis or something like that.
• 11:23
  Speaker 3: It really has to be regular and meet a regular need.
• 11:25
  Speaker 3: So we were amazed at how well this was going.
• 11:30
  Speaker 3: At that point the governor of New York reached out about hunger in New York State.
• 11:34
  Speaker 3: We contacted them and ended up getting linked up with New York City Division of Veteran Services.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: And that's when we started working with our second partner through Division of of veteran services.
• 11:45
  Speaker 3: Black Veterans for Social Justice basically provide the volunteers, and then a group called the Campaign Against Hunger over in Canarsie, next to Brooklyn there basically houses it and then creates the place where all these things happen.
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: So we replicated it and we were so excited to replicate it so we then made the decision like let's scale this across all of our sites.
• 12:09
  Speaker 3: So that then went across Atlanta, it went across Dallas, fort Worth and then to Phoenix.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: It's been an incredible program.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: So right now we do about 8,000 meals per week across each one of those sites.
• 12:22
  Speaker 3: That's how we get up to 40,000 meals a week and we have additional programs for the other HelloFresh brand as well.
• 12:27
  Speaker 3: So Green Chef, which is our organic-focused meal kit, has a community fresh market that they do in the two locations that they operate out of.
• 12:36
  Speaker 3: And then Factor, which I'm repping right here.
• 12:39
  Speaker 3: We just created the Factor Fuel for Change program.
• 12:42
  Speaker 3: We have large food production in the Chicago area and down in and it's really I would say it's exceeded expectations.
• 13:02
  Speaker 3: It really has just been something we're all very, very happy about.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: We're closing in on about 10 million meals in total early next year, so we're pretty excited about this one.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: It really started from just seeing what was happening in this immense need that was just exploding in front of us.
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: Frankly, with the pandemic and having to get really out of the box to think about it, because at that point everybody in the world discovered a meal kit.
• 13:29
  Speaker 3: Our business basically doubled overnight, which actually was a huge production challenge in the middle of the pandemic, which we rose to, and we had to think up a way to deliver food into these communities, when you know we didn't have a lot of employees to spare.
• 13:47
  Speaker 3: There were all these different challenges and it really came to partnering.
• 13:52
  Speaker 3: You know, in retrospect we'd look back at this and thought that it's probably one of the more interesting public-private partnerships ever probably one of the more interesting public-private partnerships ever and it evolved very organically from need, from us reaching out to our charity partners and then some of our municipal partners in either the city of Newark or the state of New York to just ask them how can you help us get this food to the people it needs to get to?
• 14:17
  Speaker 3: We're very good at designing meals.
• 14:19
  Speaker 3: We're very good at training people on how to pack a kit bag and we're very good at designing meals.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: We're very good at training people on how to pack a kit bag and we're very good at sourcing.
• 14:24
  Speaker 3: But then after that we needed the help to get it to where it needed to go.
• 14:29
  Speaker 3: So it's been really a testament to partnership.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: City Council down in Atlanta has done an incredible job with us.
• 14:38
  Speaker 3: Like it just over and over, we have these success stories where we have municipal partners who are really working to identify the most food insecure and really target this food that we're able to source against, and then a charity partner, usually in the middle of it, who's able to pack this and sort of do some of the other pieces we need done.
• 14:59
  Speaker 3: It's been a fantastic journey, frankly.
• 15:02
  Speaker 2: I mean, I want to ask you a very uncorporate question.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: From the point that your CEO said can you figure out a way to get rid of this excess mail?
• 15:13
  Speaker 2: To this point today, when you look in the rear view mirror, jeff, I mean, how does that make you feel?
• 15:18
  Speaker 3: That's incredible.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: It's really incredible to know that we're really about five years into the program.
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: Early next year we're going to have 10 million meals into the communities where we do business is incredible.
• 15:31
  Speaker 3: We actually, just because of the holidays, we frequently do a turkey program and last week we did our turkey program.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: City of Newark did an incredible event around it.
• 15:43
  Speaker 3: They usually do.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: They engage the local community and it's just it's so amazing when you see the images and the pictures and things that come out of this.
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: It's really it's amazing to see the impact it has.
• 15:58
  Speaker 3: Like I said, it really it exceeded everyone's expectations and the impact it was going to have in these communities.
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: Bravo.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: Truly.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I love these collaborations that bring out the best you know.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, these community partners know their community so well and y'all are building that together, this program that y'all know food clearly really, really well.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: So putting those two forces together it's just so cool.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: So I'd love for you to talk a little bit about the 13 for 13 million campaign.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: This definitely caught our eye, kind of give us lens into the campaign for those that's new to this.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: And then what's the impact that came out of that piece?
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 16:30
  Speaker 3: So I think the first step to that was, you know, we researched and then created a report called hunger matters and we found essentially that about one in three Americans have either experienced food insecurity or are experiencing food insecurity now and really interestingly within that, that younger generations are reporting significant levels of food insecurity right now as well.
• 16:53
  Speaker 3: So you know, we looked at who's an appropriate partner and how do we really bring visibility to this partner and how do we really bring visibility to this, and really no Kid Hungry just surfaced for us as the partner that would help us really bring visibility to this.
• 17:07
  Speaker 3: So from that point we developed the 13 for 13 campaign.
• 17:13
  Speaker 3: So, of course, 13 different cities to represent the 13 million children who go to bed hungry every night and try and, like I said, bring some more visibility to that.
• 17:24
  Speaker 3: So we engaged with them.
• 17:26
  Speaker 3: We put together either some direct distribution projects during the summer, like these ones where we pack kit bags and get them into the community, or open pantries, where that wasn't the right solution but really worked out a way to engage just to bring visibility to this.
• 17:41
  Speaker 3: And we did it in a fairly flexible way because one of the other things we discovered is that this was a new word for me when I came across it.
• 17:48
  Speaker 3: But food insecurity is really hyperlocal and the way you solve it changes almost from community to community.
• 17:58
  Speaker 3: Certain things are easier in some places and there's all kinds of reasons, from ambient temperature and weather to the way the community is distributed and how dense it might be All kinds of different issues that really drive that kind of hyperlocal.
• 18:14
  Speaker 3: So we came up with a couple different approaches and really hit the streets with it this summer and we're really excited to be able to do that as well.
• 18:24
  Speaker 3: I mean, it's part of this whole package for us of engaging with the communities where we do business and now really trying to even bring more visibility to food insecurity, because anybody can be suffering from food insecurity.
• 18:38
  Speaker 3: They could have a time in their life where they've had some life changes and, you know, having that decision of should we buy food or should we pay rent is very, very common.
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: It's frighteningly common across our culture.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: It is.
• 18:54
  Speaker 2: I'm so glad that you're lifting it because there's so many force multipliers here in the story that I see that I really, really value because we're in the wealthiest country in the world.
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: How do we have a third of our people that are still hungry, like?
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: When I even think about the amount of children that must be, I can never, ever reconcile a hungry child.
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: And I think what I want to compliment you on, jeff, is that John and I've been in, worked in the nonprofit sector for 20 plus years and you see a lot of these partnerships that come from large corporations and it seems to be very top down, at least in the olden days of philanthropy for me, and there's nothing top down it feels like about the story that you're telling and the agency that you gave to empower the people on the front lines of community who, to John's point, already know their audience, they know their needs, they know their names, they know their stories and I think giving dignity and respect to that level of knowledge into the connection and the trust that's already been built has me believing that that has to be why this has been such a successful campaign and I want to thank you for doing it in that way, and I'm sure we've got a ton of nonprofits and social enterprises that are listening right now saying I want to be HelloFresh's partner, I want to do something like this.
• 20:28
  Speaker 2: So I love that we're talking about not just the partnership but the awareness and the brand piece, and I just think that hunger relief is such a massive challenge and it's requiring such systemic change.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: So how do you see what's like HelloFresh and Jeff's take on seeing these cross-sector collaborations?
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: How are they starting to like play into creating these long-term solutions?
• 20:54
  Speaker 2: Because we want nonprofits and companies to come together and we think this could really be a model as a way that nonprofits could come in and really start to elevate these partnerships to create deeper impact.
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: So I would love to hear just like what you're seeing and how you see HelloFresh's role with these nonprofit partners.
• 21:16
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I can't speak highly enough of the different charities we work with.
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: I mean, food Rescue is a very difficult business.
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: They frequently run on very thin budgets and many of these companies are actually just moving food across town every day.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: They operate what's called an empty trucks model, where they basically try to pick up food and have it where it's going by the end of the day, and what they really need is partners, you know.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: So it could be food, it could be different things.
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: You know there are.
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: I think every company has really key competencies that they can lend here and you know, when we looked at it carefully, our competencies are designing delicious food, training people on how to get that, you know, packed into kit bags in a meaningful way, with all the things that come with it, and then sourcing against it.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: And we brought the full power of that forward and really look to those community partners to help us focus it in a place that wasn't part of our necessarily business model but was part of our community model, and I think that's what companies can do.
• 22:27
  Speaker 3: I think we tend to think well, I can't speak for other companies, I can only speak for ours.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: But I think that sometimes groups are thinking a little bit too much about creating an event versus creating an impact.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: There you go.
• 22:42
  Speaker 2: Now you're speaking our language for a show.
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: And, frankly, we put together a set of guiding principles when we created this program and this is another interesting story where we came up with principles like improving the accessibility and availability of healthy, nutritious food and then working disproportionately with the communities where we do business, because we have such a footprint there as well as creating long, long lasting partnerships and regularity to it.
• 23:12
  Speaker 3: Again, you know we presented this to our CEO here and he actually added a fourth, which was to seek to make impact first, and that's what we did.
• 23:22
  Speaker 3: We sought a model that would create impact and we found ways to celebrate that.
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: We have 1 million meal celebrations with these partners, but we really focused on creating impact first.
• 23:35
  Speaker 3: Um, we really start to see community partners coming forward, um and creating.
• 23:43
  Speaker 3: Frankly, you know press and media um that are that are humbling, frankly, but it's awesome because it really started with doing the right thing.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it goes back to even the vision that you shared, you know.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: I think it starts that your company truly wants to change the way people eat forever.
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: So that's like such a North star that's aligned.
• 24:04
  Speaker 1: It's easy to see the overlap with a lot of these partners.
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: I kind of want to turn the tables on you and ask I mean, we have a big nonprofit listening audience, a lot of leaders, a lot of founders that are.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: I mean, like Becky said, many are in the hunger space.
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: Also, what do you think it looks like?
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: You know, what are the better ways that nonprofits could pour in to build effective, mutually beneficial partnerships?
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: What are some hallmarks of the ways that nonprofits show up that you're like more?
• 24:30
  Speaker 3: of this, what really stands out to you?
• 24:33
  Speaker 3: So I've sat on a number of nonprofit boards over the years, usually like sustainability, professional organizations and things like that.
• 24:42
  Speaker 3: So I felt like I had at least a slight idea of what it meant to be at a nonprofit and trying to find partners to work with.
• 24:53
  Speaker 3: So I was probably a pretty friendly partner.
• 24:57
  Speaker 3: I believe that you're very friendly right now I want to be your friend for sure a meal kit for the food insecure.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: You know, our, our, our table to table, um did not have.
• 25:23
  Speaker 3: We had no idea that anything was going to, anything like this was going to come out of this and they really just jumped at the chance to uh, to help us.
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: And so I mean the, the charities that we've worked with, um, second helpings of Atlanta, um, you, you know, some of these groups have they.
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: It's almost like they continue to surprise us in how they handle this program and what they do with it, and we continue to learn from them.
• 25:50
  Speaker 3: I think we've identified a gap where, you know, if we can point a fire hose of food, they know where to shoot it, and so they've done a great job with that.
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: And the partnership was very natural and organic.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: And you know, I would say that that's what's made it work so well, is that we had really interlocking needs here, or abilities.
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: So it it, you know, we found that that synergistic point where, um, our goals as a, as a company, really just meshed so well with what these, uh, with what these food rescue organizations were trying to do and, frankly, coming up with volunteers to pack 2000 kit bags every week is is actually a little bit of a challenge as well.
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: I mean, you've got volunteer fatigue, you've got sort of all these these things that are difficult, um, and they really demonstrated quite a bit of resourcefulness to find ways to deliver against that and continue to make it happen.
• 26:51
  Speaker 3: So in the end it's been this just very resourceful, open exchange between us that's created so much value.
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: But it takes two to do that dance and that kind of a partnership, and so to any corporates that are listening, it's almost better not to come with a strong idea of what you want.
• 27:09
  Speaker 3: Come with some ideas and figure out what really works best for both organizations.
• 27:17
  Speaker 3: Because that's what we did and it really I don't think we would have designed this this way if we had not kind of stumbled our way into it in the middle of a pandemic.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: It reminds me so much John of I don't remember what episode it was, but it had to be like episode 15 or something like that where we had this incredible conversation We'll drop it in the show notes for this episode as well with Feeding Tampa Bay, and this was in like October of 2020.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: And they had talked about a similar partnership.
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: They ended up merging with another nonprofit when they found out that there was duplicative services that they were both providing within their town.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: They partnered with somebody else to get Wi-Fi at all of these cafes where people were eating, and I think what I'm hearing you say that resonates so much with that story.
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: And what you're saying is the opportunity to co-build together is the great unlock here.
• 28:47
  Speaker 2: Everybody's bringing what they have to the table, what they know, and they're co-building this solution.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: That is empowering people.
• 28:53
  Speaker 2: That is inviting people into the experience.
• 28:57
  Speaker 2: Again, we're not just asking donors to come in as donors.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: We want them to have an experience with us so they'll stay with us in these journeys, because it's not about ABC organization, it's about hunger, it's about the environment, it's about social justice, it's about all of these things.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: So I just want to commend you, I want to commend your humility, and I just think that this is such the way that I hope future partnerships are coming.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: And I'm also going to say brace yourself, jeff, because I don't know how many nonprofit hunger org charities are going to hear this.
• 29:29
  Speaker 2: And here they come.
• 29:30
  Speaker 3: We're definitely open to chatting to anybody.
• 29:34
  Speaker 3: We clearly have our ecosystem of partners worked out pretty well right now, but these things always change.
• 29:41
  Speaker 3: We're always happy to talk to people, um, so we're open to that and I think that's you know, that is a piece of it is is continuing to look and understand what's out there and what's possible.
• 29:51
  Speaker 3: We we did a really interesting program, uh within the last year, um, uh, with a large company that makes refrigerators to actually get food into community refrigerators.
• 30:01
  Speaker 3: So you know, finding those spaces where, where you can act together is just so important.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: Agreed.
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: We just think community is everything, and so we truly value the power of story on this podcast, and we are wondering if there is a story of philanthropy or generosity in your lifetime that was so poignant, it just stayed with you.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: It could be a little moment, it could be a bigger moment, it could be recent, it could be in your childhood.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: What's a story of generosity or kindness that really sticks out to you?
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: You'd like to share.
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: This is the biggest one in my life right now.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: Frankly and I think I've told my story here because I mean honestly having the CEO of a very large corporation that's publicly traded to number one say, like figure out how to get food into the community and then number two, seek to make impact first, really were very powerful things, I think, and has been very inspiring, both as an employee as well as someone just putting the program together, I think, and as a human being.
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: I was going to say.
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: As a consumer, I love hearing that.
• 31:14
  Speaker 2: It makes me feel so happy that you're not throwing the food away in the trash bin.
• 31:20
  Speaker 2: It enhances my connection to the brand.
• 31:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I probably failed to say earlier the interesting thing about meal kits with our weekly changeover, so there's 40 or 50 recipes on the menu.
• 31:31
  Speaker 3: Those change every week.
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: We have a constant weekly cycle of inventory inside our distribution centers which essentially means we have quite a bit of, even at a very small percent.
• 31:43
  Speaker 3: I would say so if we were maybe one or 2% unused inventory at the end of the week, which is of course quite low.
• 31:50
  Speaker 3: If you look at retail you usually see much higher food waste numbers.
• 31:53
  Speaker 3: But if we have about 2% at the end of the week, if we can't sell it in the next week and we can make that determine our quality team can make that determination very quickly.
• 32:04
  Speaker 3: It's then becomes just sort of like a business problem of getting it out of the facility and our charity partners are very good at coming and picking that up.
• 32:13
  Speaker 3: So even before we had this program we had a very strong donation program in place.
• 32:19
  Speaker 3: Anything that meets our quality standards goes almost immediately into the local community.
• 32:25
  Speaker 3: That's usually quite a lot of produce.
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: The story really started long ago with HelloFresh and it just became sort of this very intentional program with food that we source to donate around this Meals with Meaning program that has made such a big difference more recently.
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: But we've really got a history of this, I think, of really trying to minimize this.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: I would also say anything that can't be donated.
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: We try very hard to either to use what's called organics recycling so that might be composting, or a much more technical process called anaerobic digestion that makes biogas out of it.
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: But we work very hard to minimize our food waste as much as we can, and donations are such a big role in that.
• 33:10
  Speaker 3: If I had one more message for corporations listening, there is no reason not to donate food.
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: There's frequently concerns about liability and things like that.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: There are a number of different Good Samaritan acts out there that will essentially protect you from any liability if you donate that food in good faith, meaning that it met a quality standard at the time you donated it.
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: We really have been quite aggressive with making those donations as much as we can and have found really fascinating ways to do them right.
• 33:44
  Speaker 3: I mean, besides this program, we do try to work with some culinary schools, especially like culinary arts trade programs in high schools, and we might have surplus after the holidays.
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: So I mentioned we did a turkey program.
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: We of course, have a holiday box that we do at HelloFresh.
• 34:02
  Speaker 3: If we don't sell all those turkeys, we're certainly not going to save them for next year and we're not offering a turkey box again.
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: Those will go into like a culinary arts school where they can work on practicing with items like that and are able to actually make some really interesting meals with it and learn to cook something like that.
• 34:19
  Speaker 3: I'm here for that.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: Not John, but I'm here for that.
• 34:24
  Speaker 3: It's really getting creative with how do we take what we have and use it in interesting ways.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: You know, really trying to be a member of the communities that we're in in different ways.
• 34:33
  Speaker 1: Love that, yeah, it's just the spirit of like, bringing what you have, which you, which you uniquely, are gifted with, and excess Like.
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: That's such a beautiful story.
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: So I mean, jeff, I'm loving that you're bringing your compliance vibes You're even giving us advice about how we can stay regulatory Okay on this supply chain.
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: You're threading all this together.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: We like to end all of our episodes asking for a one good thing, and that could be a secret to your success, obviously for this incredible career in sustainability.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: Or it may just be like a life hack that you just want to share, something that's bubbled up for you in this conversation.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: What's your one good thing today?
• 35:07
  Speaker 3: Keep a journal right in it.
• 35:09
  Speaker 3: I wrote a whole bunch of stuff just this last weekend and it was Thanksgiving based, like but you know beyond like what am I thankful for?
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: I was writing things like how lucky am I to have had some of the different mentors I've had in my life and different people who've come through my life?
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: But write it down Like write it down Every life is worth living.
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: Write some of it down.
• 35:33
  Speaker 2: I think that's so beautiful and, as your chief storyteller over here, I think that there are always stories that deserve to be told but also reflected on, and I think journaling is such a great practice for that.
• 35:45
  Speaker 2: So, jeff, people are going to want to know how to connect with you.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: They're going to want to learn more about this program.
• 35:53
  Speaker 2: Tell us, like all your marketing handles, where do you hang out?
• 35:56
  Speaker 2: Where can people follow HelloFresh and where can they follow you?
• 35:59
  Speaker 3: Sure, so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn.
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: That's not a tough one and with my last name you'll find it right away.
• 36:07
  Speaker 3: But certainly you know HelloFreshcom for the HelloFresh site, factorcom HelloFresh has a really fun Instagram page, so I would definitely point people in that direction.
• 36:21
  Speaker 2: Jeff, I just think it's a gift to be able to know this story.
• 36:24
  Speaker 2: It's a gift to know that a human like you is out in the world powering this work in this way.
• 36:30
  Speaker 2: I just want to thank you on behalf of us and all of the people who benefit from this incredible program.
• 36:37
  Speaker 2: Keep going, we need more of you in the world.
• 36:40
  Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
• 36:41
  Speaker 3: I mean just really appreciate the opportunity to tell the story a little bit.
• 36:44
  Speaker 3: Thanks for the work you're doing, just featuring organizations who are out there doing good in the world, because I think we need a lot more of that.
• 36:51
  Speaker 3: There's way too much negative news out there in the world and this is kind of, I think, what we need to be reminded of.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: It was Mr um, it was Mr Rogers who told us whenever you see a problem, make sure you look for the helpers, and so I really respect the two of you for looking for those people and finding them and trying to learn their story.
• 37:11
  Speaker 2: Send us your friends, bring them on over, send us your good stories.
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, you're a treasure.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: Thank you, jeff.
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: So much gratitude, thank you.