FlashFood Representatives to Attend International Web Summit

We are excited to announce that FlashFood will be sending two representatives to this year’s Web Summit, a conference hosted in Dublin, Ireland that brings together thousands of attendees and hundreds of speakers from across the globe. The Web Summit aims to bring together some of the world’s most dynamic leaders and innovators in technology to network and share knowledge and ideas.

FlashFood’s Director of Marketing Jake Irvin and Director of IT Steven Hernandez are being sent to Dublin to represent FlashFood at this prestigious event on October 30th and 31st. During their time in Dublin, Jake and Steven will have the opportunity to network with thousands of the world’s leading technology and Web experts and to sit in on lectures given by

speakers ranging from the CEO of Charity: Water to the Founding Developer of WordPress. Some of the other highlighted attendees for this year’s Summit include:  Tony Hawk, Founder of the Tony Hawk Foundation; Peter Arvai, Founder and CEO of Prezi; Drew Houston, Co-Founder and CEO of Dropbox; and Ben Rattray, Founder and CEO of change.org.

 Here’s what Jake had to say about his hopes for the Summit:

“Steven and I are excited for this opportunity to network with other tech startup companies. Since many of the startups there probably face or have faced a lot of similar problems that we do, it will be great to learn from the other ventures’ experiences and apply new strategies in growing our business.”

We can’t wait to hear about Jake and Steven’s experiences, and to utilize the knowledge and networks they gain from participating in this incredible event.

To learn more about the Dublin Web Summit, you can visit their website at: http://www.websummit.net/

The FlashFood Blog has moved!

Hello Everyone!

Our blog is now on our website at http://flashfoodrecovery.com/blog/. From this point on, we will not have any new posts on this site (flashfoodasu.wordpress.com), and by Friday we will shut down this site. Don’t worry, our site has all of archived posts in case you want to take a look!

Thanks for your continued visits!

-Jake

Kaleidoscope Juice Joins FlashFood

We are pleased to announce that Kaleidoscope Juice of Scottsdale, Arizona, is now working with us to donate their extra food to a local community center! Their donation of healthy inventory, including hand-made juices, salads, and energy bars, is highly appreciated by many members of our community.

Work for a food service or retail business in the Phoenix Metro Area and want to donate your extra food inventory? Want to volunteer to help move donated food to community centers? Feel free to email us at info@flashfoodrecovery.com!

NCIIA Workshop

Last weekend, four of us had the privilege of attending the National Collegiate Inventors Association E-Team workshop in Boston. At the workshop, we listened to several successful entrepreneurs share their start-up wisdom, and took part in several exercises designed to help us refine our value proposition, identify solutions to challenges we face, and create a winning go-to-market strategy.

Perhaps the most valuable part of our weekend was the strategy mapping exercise facilitated by James Barlow. We knew going into the workshop that we had a tremendous amount of work to do in order to become an international food recovery network. Sometimes, like many businesses, we would feel bogged down by the many inter-connected challenges that prevent us from growing our organization and accomplishing our goals. Through strategy mapping, we were forced to list every problem that gets in our way, as well as potential solutions, using sticky notes on a giant canvas.

Next, we drew lines connecting each problem and solution. Oftentimes, problems were connected to other problems, which in turn had multiple solutions, but then certain solutions may cause other problems. Things got complicated! However, once we had everything out on our canvas, we could easily organize problems and solutions into particular categories, including resources, people, activities, and products. Categorization was an important step, as it forced us to get extremely specific when figuring out what we need to accomplish moving forward.

Thanks NCIIA for an awesome weekend!

Rice Business Plan Competition

Eric and Katelyn saying “Go Devils!” in the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Last week, Eric and I traveled to Houston, Texas, to represent FlashFood in the finals of the Rice Business Plan Competition. It was a privilege to compete in such a prestigious competition.  After 3 pitches, we walked away with $700, dozens of business cards, hundreds of well wishes, and we are one step closer to making making our vision a reality. A big thanks to everyone who helped us prepare for this competition.

To learn more about the outstanding work of the Houston Food Bank visit their website. You can also read about the other exciting startup companies that were at the competition.

-Katelyn

FlashFood Meets Maynard Webb

On Monday, Mary Hannah and I had the amazing experience of meeting Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay and current Yahoo! and Salesforce.com board member, through the ASU Edson program. After attending his guest lecture, we met with Mr. Webb for a small group discussion with other Edson companies to share our experiences in starting companies, and to ask for guidance on how to surmount challenges we face. Reflecting on his own experiences, he offered valuable advice addressing the issues and frustrations we face in our businesses and individual career paths. It was an experience we will never forget!

We  highly recommend his new book, Rebooting Work. The theme of his book that resonated the most with us was that anyone can become “CEOs of their own destinies” and have a successful career. Mr. Webb offers practical, actionable solutions  for anyone who feels unsatisfied in their current job to help them start the career they have always wanted. You can listen to Mr. Webb discussing his book in this Tech Crunch interview.

-Jake

Eric presents at Ignite@ASU

Last night, Eric, FlashFood’s Executive Director, along with about a dozen other Arizona State University students, gave an engaging and insightful presentation at Ignite@ASU. The format and style of Ignite is modeled after the renowned Ted Talks, where speakers use timed powerpoint slide shows and are allotted roughly twenty minutes to present. However, instead of twenty minutes, each Ignite presenter only has five minutes to tell their story. The Ignite tagline, and philosophy, is “enlighten us, but make it quick”.

Eric’s talk focused on the problems of food waste and hunger in America, but he emphasized the impact that many people in our communities are making through food rescue, which involves recovering extra food from food service and retail businesses and donating it to hungry. He also brought up a very important point; most food is wasted along the supply chain before even reaching restaurants and grocers.  It ‘s crucial that we adopt innovative long-term strategies to mitigate the problem of food waste all along the supply chain, and we need more innovators to create solutions.

He concluded his speech with an inspiring call to action for everyone in the audience; pick one problem that bothers you more than anything else, and think of new and creative ways to solve it.

To see videos of past Ignite@ASU presentations, check out their site. We should have a video of Eric’s talk posted soon!

FlashFood Pitches to CEO of World’s Largest NGO

Yesterday, I had the amazing opportunity to tell the story of FlashFood to Susan Davis, the Founder and CEO of Brac USA. Brac is the world’s largest nongovernmental organization, employing 100,000 and reaching over 126 million people with its services. The organization focuses on empowering disadvantaged communities around the world by offering services in microfinance, agriculture and food security, women’s rights and advocacy, social enterprise support, and many others. After the pitch,  I was also lucky receive some valuable feedback from Susan about how we can continue to improve FlashFood and expand more rapidly to other communities outside of Phoenix.

It was also great to get updates on fellow ASU Edson students’ companies who also pitched at the event, including G3Box, Vantage Realized, Pollentech, and SunSelect. It’s always an awesome experience when so many smart and talented people meet to share ideas and give advice!

-Jake

FlashFood Nominated for Inc. Magazine’s Coolest College Startup!

We could not be more excited to be nominated for Inc. Magazine’s Coolest College Startup!

This competition features twelve other student-owned startups from American Universities. The company that earns the most votes by May 1 will be crowned the coolest.

To vote for FlashFood, all you have to do is click the Facebook “Like” button on our Inc. profile page. You can only vote once, so we would appreciate it if you shared this with your friends!

Thank you for your continued support!

FlashFood’s First Food Recovery!

Yesterday afternoon we took a major step in our goal to change the way the world treats leftover food; we made our first food recovery! Using the FlashFood mobile application, we were notified of extra food from a donating business, which we delivered near downtown Phoenix. We are excited to build on this success and develop more partnerships with businesses and community centers.

Do you want to be a part or our innovative approach to reducing waste and feeding the hungry? Let us know! We are always looking for new partners. Email info@flashfoodrecovery.com or leave a comment.

Katelyn and Shayla packaging food

Some of the food recovered. Fun fact: the box the food was transported in is so strong, you can run it over with a car and it won’t break!

Steven, Katelyn and Shayla transporting food

En route with donated food! Pretty nifty car topper, eh?