Knead

One day, more than a decade ago, Lourdes Juan walked into a local bakery to lend a hand in its donation program. She picked up a massive load of day-old bread — 200 pounds’ worth — and drove it to the Calgary Drop-In Centre. There, she was told the loaves would be quickly used because 3,000 meals were being served daily. “Not coming from the non-profit or food-security sector, I found it really shocking,” says Juan, an urban planner by trade. “That was really my a-ha moment — that’s how it started.”

Stirred, she began to ask coffee-shop owners if she could grab food that didn’t sell so she could transport it to those who needed it. “That really grew,” says Juan, BA’05, MA’10. “There wasn’t really organized food rescue in Calgary at the time. I started to rally folks around the cause.” That led to her 2012 creation of Leftovers Foundation, which would become the largest food-rescue organization in Western Canada.

But, aware that nearly 40 per cent of the food produced globally is wasted, Juan wanted to expand the reach beyond one charity. What if she and co-founder Ryan Perez, BComm’08, took the software they had developed for the Leftovers operation and made it available around the world? Knead Technologies was born. “In our minds, food-rescue operations are really ignored in terms of software that can really help them scale,” Juan says. “We’re really dedicated to getting perishable food from one place to the next.”

Knead is now conducting pilots in Canada and the U.S., while in early talks with organizations in Jamaica and the United Kingdom. “We really see ourselves as a social impact company, a true social enterprise,” she says. “We are working with non-profits and charities and providing them with a technical solution that works. On top of that, we’re tracking how much food we’re diverting from the landfill, where it causes methane gas, and really starting to understand impact in terms of offsetting carbon emissions.”

Visit Knead Technologies’ website for more information.

Knead Technologies has received investment from UCeed, a venture philanthropy fund accelerating UCalgary and community-based startup companies to advance problem-solving research, create jobs and fuel the economy. A key program in the UCalgary innovation ecosystem, UCeed bridges the gap between innovation, demonstration and commercialization, and is managed by UCalgary’s knowledge-transfer and business incubator, Innovate Calgary.

The UCeed Social Impact Fund is powered by the generosity of the United Way of Calgary and Area and its mission to mobilize communities for lasting social change and the Government of Alberta’s Creative Partnerships initiative to support arts and non-profit sectors.