Food Rescue Hero App Honored by Consumer Technology Association
The only non-profit honored in the CES 2020 Innovation Awards’ “Tech for a Better World” category, Food Rescue Hero has saved more than 10 million pounds of food from going to landfills.
Pittsburgh, PENNSYLVANIA (December 16, 2019) – Pittsburgh-based app Food Rescue Hero is an honoree of the prestigious CES 2020 Innovation Awards, recognized in the “Tech for a Better World” category. The CES Innovation Awards is an annual competition for outstanding design and engineering in consumer technology products, open to international manufacturers, designers, or engineers who market tech products in the United States. Owned and produced by the Consumer Technology Association, CES is one of the largest technology conferences in the world.
Food Rescue Hero is a food recovery and redistribution platform that harnesses surplus food to impact hunger. The app, on iOS and Android, matches available food donations to appropriate nonprofits, coordinates a last-mile transportation network of volunteers, and tracks data and analytics to measure its impact on hunger and the environment. When there is a “match” between a food donation and a nonprofit that would like to receive it, the app alerts nearby volunteers of the available “rescue.” Once a volunteer accepts a rescue, the app guides them, providing built-in navigation, delivery verification, and social media tools.
The platform provides a web-based administrative tool and iOS and Android apps that are customized for each individual city. The administrative tool allows the local operations team to manage the food rescue lifecycle for their city. The apps are built using a cross-platform development solution that allows the team to code once and deploy to both app stores, reducing the amount of maintenance necessary.
With 10,000 active volunteers on the app, Food Rescue Hero has created the largest volunteer driver network in the world, and that network has redirected over 10 million pounds of good food from landfills to people who need it. Based in Pittsburgh, Food Rescue Hero now also measurably impacts food insecurity in Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Northern Virginia, and soon, Los Angeles. In line with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, it is set to be in 100 cities by 2030.
Food Rescue Hero is the only honoree in CES’s “Tech for a Better World” category that is produced by a non-profit. The platform is an offshoot of Pittsburgh food waste non-profit 412 Food Rescue, which runs several additional innovative programs to combat food insecurity, including its Ugly CSA program, opportunities for food education at its Millvale Kitchen, and a Hidden Harvest program that gleans forgotten fruit from public and private trees.
About Food Rescue Hero:
Food Rescue Hero is a platform that helps food recovery and hunger organizations launch and scale food recovery. In the United States, 40 percent of food produced is wasted while one in nine people goes hungry. Focusing on the logistical challenges of retail food recovery, Food Rescue Hero addresses both problems through technology-coordinated, community-powered networks. Through the app, volunteer drivers are alerted when surplus food is available to be picked up near them. Since its launch in 2016, the app has redirected more than 10 million pounds of perfectly good food from landfills to the people who need it. Food Rescue Hero is based in Pittsburgh and now measurably impacts food insecurity in Cleveland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Northern Virginia, and soon, Los Angeles. In support of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 2, 12 and 13, its goal is to scale food recovery in 100 cities by 2030.
