Today we’d like to introduce you to Trefos, a platform solving food waste through innovation.
Their team consists of Jay Bhalala, Jeremy Chuah, Nikhil Jain, and Emmanuel Tawiah.
Hi Trefos, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start, maybe you can share some of your backstories with our readers.
The idea for Trefos was initially created when we saw a viral TikTok of Dunkin Donut employees throwing out masses of uneaten donuts, most of which were still edible, after closing. We thought to ourselves how this much food could be wasted on a daily basis and wondered why no real standardized platform or service was in place to help prevent food waste. So, we dove deeper and researched food waste to better understand the situation and what we found was alarming. We found that in the United States alone, food waste is estimated at between 30-40 percent of the food supply. In addition, 85% of the food not used by restaurants is thrown out, and over one-third of food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, amounting to almost 1 trillion US dollars worth of food. We instantly thought about the community and how so many underprivileged families were deprived of food despite food waste at such high levels still occurring. It was at this point we decided action must be taken. We brainstormed different ideas and concepts that could help prevent and lessen food waste, including organizing food drives, volunteering at food pantries, and even manually going from restaurant to restaurant to ask them for excess food and then driving it to food banks. In the end, we decided to leverage our skills involving technology and programming to develop a website that would regulate food waste by connecting restaurants directly to food banks through an easy-to-use platform. After doing so, it was about developing our website as well as marketing our service to restaurants and food banks. Two of our co-founders, Jeremy Chuah and Jay Bhalala, focused on developing the website, while the other two, Nikhil Jain and Emmanuel Tawiah, focused on marketing. After Chuah and Bhalala finished the website, they transitioned into helping to market the platform.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
The process of creating and building our organization has definitely not been all smooth sailing. The most challenging aspect has been recruiting restaurants to join our platform. We believe this was due to restaurants not trusting such a new platform, especially because it is run by high-schoolers. However, we were able to overcome this by the continuous drive to go out and connect with different restaurants and pitch them our service. We found that once we were able to get a few restaurants to join our platform, the rest came much easier.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Trefos?
At Trefos, our main goal is to connect local restaurants to nearby food banks to reduce the amount of food waste being generated within our community. We do so through our website, where restaurants are able to create a profile in which they can upload all the excess food that they have available to give out that day. Restaurants can also upload their contact information to allow food banks to reach out to them. On the food bank side, they can view all the available restaurants and connect with the ones that are the most convenient based on factors such as distance, the quantity of available food, etc. We believe what sets us apart from others is our volunteering network which allows high school volunteers to gain hours by delivering the food from the restaurants to the food banks. How this works is that food banks will contact our team if they would like to be involved in our volunteering network. We then place their contact info onto our volunteering page to allow any volunteer to contact these food banks and volunteer for them by picking up food from restaurants and dropping them off at their food banks. We have gained a volunteer base by reaching out to various NHS programs in multiple high schools in our area. Additionally, in our community, there are many food banks and hunger groups but not much of a system between them. Our website provides both restaurants and food banks with a tangible system to make this process much easier to solve. Furthermore, brand-wise, we are very proud of how we are able to impact our community in such a big way despite our age as being a high schooler could serve as a barrier to creating change on such a large scale.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
We believe that risk-taking is very important and essential for any person, organization, etc. to partake in as you never know what’s on the other side of a risky decision. It has the potential to benefit you greatly. With Trefos, we took a large risk when acting upon our idea due to its potential reception. Because the traditional method to stop food waste was for food banks to contact restaurants directly to ask for any food they may have left over, resulting in just a one-to-one connection, we took a risk by digitalizing this process and creating a network of restaurants to food bank connections while adding many extra features to it without knowing how it would be accepted by restaurants and food banks. Fortunately, it worked in our favor as we now have a very extensive customer base.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.trefos.me/
Image Credits
Jay Bhalala
Jeremy Chuah
Nikhil Jain
Emmanuel Tawiah
