Food Waste: Sights, smells and numbers from the trenches

Speaker: Raj Karmani, Zero Percent

Abstract: Raj Karmani is the founder of Zero Percent, a Chicago-based public benefit corporation with the mission to reduce food waste.  Zero Percent provides an online food rescue platform, and partner with restaurants and food operators  to make sure that any excess food is donated to local charities in an easy, reliable and safe way. Every donation is tracked using an Uber-style app and detailed data is available on a dashboard for analysis. The platform has coordinated the rescue of 1.5 million pounds of food in Chicago, Champaign and Nashville. In this talk, Raj will share the experiences, lessons and challenges from food waste reduction efforts.

Raj has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. During the last year of his PhD, he co-founded Zero Percent that combines his passion for technology, volunteerism, and entrepreneurship. Zero Percent went through the Impact Engine accelerator in Chicago and raised outside capital in 2014. In 2016, Zero Percent received the Moxie award for the Best Social Impact Startup by Built in Chicago.