Jasmine Crowe-Houston saw it when she volunteered for a group filling thousands of lunch bags with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and giving no thought to peanut allergies. She saw it when food pantries received donations of spaghetti noodles without sauce or barbecue sauce without meat. No matter the place, no matter the oversight, her understanding was the same: Efforts to battle hunger were creating problems along with their solutions.

“The biggest thing I noticed was a real lack of dignity,” said Crowe-Houston, the founder of Goodr, which since 2017 has used technology to improve the process and quality of food donation and distribution and is the MDRT Foundation charity partner for the 2024 MDRT EDGE in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. “It was often, ‘Hey, you’re hungry; take it and be happy.’”

Yet she didn’t fully process how widespread the issue was until she visited a friend who didn’t have any food in her fridge. Discovering that people close to her didn’t know how they would feed their kids was shocking and made Crowe-Houston even more dedicated to developing an organization that would be forward-thinking about how to acquire and give food to those in need. With the goal of reducing waste and elevating the quality of donated food, Crowe-Houston began exploring how an app could better manage what was available to be donated and how it arrived at facilities equipped to receive it.

Change in action

Goodr inventories everything a business sells so employees from the donating businesses can click on items they have available for pickup. Through a logistics network, Goodr allows community nonprofits to order donations like a UPS package that’s being tracked. 

“It’s not a huge habit-changing thing; people are already throwing this food away,” Crowe-Houston said. “But now we come in and become a waste pickup company that keeps food out of a landfill.”

Goodr operates in 26 markets in the U.S. and also builds grocery stores inside of schools where children and families can pick out free groceries they know how to cook and will actually use. This approach reduces waste — it accomplishes nothing to give people food they won’t eat — and improves the lives and health of the people receiving the food.

That matters for recipients like the woman who emailed Crowe-Houston to thank her for creating the most organized food distribution system she’d ever seen and for giving her meat that wasn’t brown. “That shook me to my core,” Crowe-Houston said. “It showed me what I always believed to be true, that needy people usually get the bottom of the barrel.” Just three weeks ago, Crowe-Houston received an email from a grandmother thanking her for helping her granddaughter fulfill her efforts to eat healthy food like fish and vegetables, which often is unaffordable and unavailable through donations.

Atlanta has one of the largest income wealth gaps in the U.S., Crowe-Houston said, and food insecurity has only increased as rents have skyrocketed, and wages haven’t kept pace. Her organization’s goal isn’t to permanently solve people’s hunger issues but to provide relief for a few days at a time.

“I always tell people that hunger doesn’t discriminate. It sees no color, no race, no religion,” said Crowe-Houston, who has seen the issue in shanty towns in South Africa, slums in Haiti, favelas in Brazil and in low-income households in Atlanta. “I was one of the people who thought, I would’ve never thought it was as bad as I’ve seen it get, and it’s been life-changing for me to see this work.”

Crowe-Houston has worked to feed and support unhoused people since she lived in Phoenix during 2009. She recalls times growing up when her family had to choose between paying bills on time or having food for the family, but her motivation to help isn’t driven by personal experience.

“I’ve always been a service-oriented person,” she said. “I want to help because there’s an opportunity for me to help, and I’m going to go out there and do it.”

Participants at the EDGE on-site service project will help make thousands of snack packs for nonprofits in Atlanta, with each pack containing three meals and two snacks. Won’t be at EDGE and want to get involved? Visit goodr.co, reach out at info@goodr.co, or connect via social media. Goodr has a toolkit with ways to educate people about food waste as well as a blog where people can identify locations where they believe food is being wasted.

And speaking of getting involved: Crowe-Houston’s aforementioned friend, who had been struggling with her own food insecurity, is doing much better now and is a Goodr volunteer.

“If you hang around me long enough, you’re probably going to have to do something,” Crowe-Houston said. “I’m always doing something.”

Partners beyond names

To clarify: Goodr, the EDGE charity partner, is a different organization than Goodr, a company you might know for its fashionable-yet-inexpensive sunglasses. However, the two groups have been in conversation, and the sunglasses company made a pair and donated a percentage of sales to Crowe-Houston’s Goodr.