In the middle of a repurposed warehouse sat a small circular stage, ringed by dozens of chairs and beanbags, all filled with people eagerly awaiting visionary speakers — including one who has helped feed millions of hungry people in less than eight years.
Under lights and with cameras rolling at October’s TEDNext conference at Pullman Yards, Jasmine Crowe-Houston took to the stage.
Credit: Gilberto Tadday / TED
Credit: Gilberto Tadday / TED
Crowe-Houston has become a coveted conference speaker and influential thought leader all just for doing good. She is the founder of Goodr, an Atlanta-based company that uses technology to address food waste and hunger.
Though Goodr’s mission is to help feed people, the company does this as a certified B Corporation, not as a nonprofit. Crowe-Houston saw that businesses were already paying waste management companies to throw food away, so she thought her company could redirect that spending into more sustainable solutions to food waste. In return, her customers get a tax deduction receipt and move closer to their climate or sustainability goals.
Since founding the company in 2017, Crowe-Houston’s impact has expanded to 15 states. Goodr has opened more than two dozen free grocery stores, diverted 4 million pounds of food from landfills and served 30 million meals to people in need.
For Crowe-Houston, getting to this point was years in the making. But doing good has been a throughline of her life, like in her side hustle years ago helping celebrities like “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star Kandi Burruss and the rapper Future start their foundations.
“I don’t even look at it as a hustle because it felt really good to help people do good,” Crowe-Houston told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It’s the best job in the world.”
But her path to helping deliver millions of meals to hungry people through Goodr started nearly 2,000 miles away from Atlanta inside an old ice cream truck in Phoenix. It was around 2010, Crowe-Houston was in her mid-20s and working in recruitment for law schools, but she decided to open the truck on the side — her first foray into entrepreneurship. She changed the truck from ice cream to cupcakes and started going to festivals around Phoenix.
“All the cupcakes were named after R&B and rock ‘n’ roll legends,” Crowe-Houston said. “I had like a grape cupcake that was named after Prince.”
Even through selling sweets, she worked to give back to her community. Each month she had a cupcake for which 50 cents from every sale would go to different nonprofits. While running the truck, Crowe-Houston also started a blog called Black Celebrity Giving to highlight the nonprofit work African American stars were doing.
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
Credit: Olivia Bowdoin
In 2012, Crowe-Houston was able to sell the truck for $30,000 and use the money to get established in Georgia, a time when, she said, “it was cheap to live in Atlanta.”
“Coming into Atlanta with like $30,000 I had, like, two years’ worth of rent. I was good to go,” Crowe-Houston recalled. “I was like, ‘I’m rich.‘”
Once in Atlanta, her work with Black Celebrity Giving blossomed and she was contracted by the city’s stars to set up their foundations, establishing relationships that have continued to this day. Burruss still partners with Crowe-Houston through Goodr.
But at the same time she was working with celebrities, Crowe-Houston would drive through downtown Atlanta and see the deep poverty of the people gathered around the now-shuttered Peachtree-Pine shelter. She had volunteered with an organization to help feed homeless people while living in Phoenix and wanted to start doing that again, but in a “more dignified fashion than what I was used to seeing.”
So, one day in October 2013, Crowe-Houston decided to cook spaghetti, corn salad and garlic bread in her apartment. She brought the food downtown to feed anyone who needed a meal. She fed about 100 people that day and decided to make it a recurring thing.
She started hosting a pop-up restaurant serving multicourse meals a few Sundays a month near emergency homeless shelters and called it Sunday Soul. Crowe-Houston would set up tables with linens and chairs at a park, or even under the bridge near Grady Memorial Hospital, and print out menus to make it feel like a restaurant. But a key difference — all the meals were free.
Crowe-Houston did Sunday Soul for about five years. On holidays, she’d make it extra special, with ham and fried chicken for Easter or trays of deviled eggs for the Fourth of July. It was through her Sunday Soul pop-ups that she got the inspiration for Goodr.
“A video from one of my Sunday Soul pop-up restaurants went viral on Facebook, and as I was reading through the comments, amongst the praise, one of the reoccurring questions people kept asking was who donated the food? And the truth was nobody,” Crowe-Houston said. She was buying most of the food herself, though people started to donate money for the pop-ups and sometimes food banks would provide some ingredients.
But that question prompted her to search for a list of businesses that could donate food so she could expand her initiative, but instead she went down a deep rabbit hole on how billions of dollars worth of food in the U.S. is wasted.
“All the while I’m seeing how many people are going hungry, and, you know, seeing people bring their families on MARTA after having to sell their food stamps to pay their rent, just to be able to eat every week with me,” she said.
Credit: Steve Schaefer
Credit: Steve Schaefer
She felt it was a problem that could be solved, and she could be the one to do it.
At last October’s TEDNext conference, 11 years to the month after Crowe-Houston first started her pop-ups, she was on a circular stage telling the world about what she’s learned since putting pen to paper in 2017 and dreaming up Goodr.
“Hunger is not an issue of scarcity,” she said. “It’s really about logistics. How do we connect this excess food with the millions of people?”
Goodr does this in two ways. First, by keeping a business’ excess food out of landfills. Edible food is given to nonprofits, churches and schools while inedible food is composted or used as animal feed. Goodr keeps track of the data for businesses so they know what items they’re wasting the most and how much carbon emissions they’ve kept out of the atmosphere by not throwing away the food.
Second, Goodr works with cities, states and school districts to help hungry people with a more sustainable model than a food pantry. Goodr builds free grocery stores in schools or sets up pop-up markets in food deserts.
The first company to give Crowe-Houston a shot was Turner Broadcasting. An administrative assistant at the company who followed Crowe-Houston on social media saw how much food would be wasted on sets or from catered meetings, so she decided to set up a meeting between Goodr and Turner executives.
“I give my little pitch, the chef is like, ‘Yes, we’ll try it out.’ And they started trying Goodr out before we had any technology,” Crowe-Houston said. She would pick up the trays of leftover food from Turner in her Hyundai Sonata, deliver it to nonprofits and text the chef a picture once it was delivered.
But Goodr has grown considerably since those early days, counting major entities like Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Georgia World Congress Center and Wellstar Health System as clients. Crowe-Houston has raised $8 million for the business and 29 full-time staff and contractors.
Goodr will also open its first affordable grocery store for the general public in Edgewood this year, just blocks from the bridge where Crowe-Houston used to host Sunday Soul pop-up restaurants.
But more than the accolades and investments, it’s knowing someone didn’t go hungry because of Goodr that keeps Crowe-Houston going.
“I’ve had a lady come up to me … and she said to me, ‘You know, during the pandemic, I saw a flyer for one of your pop-ups,‘” Crowe-Houston recalled. The woman was hesitant to take the free food, but she really needed it.
Afterward, she told Crowe-Houston: “‘I’ve never received food in that way, in that dignity, in that fashion.‘”
“And so,” Crowe-Houston said, “I know we have made an impact.”
Jasmine Crowe-Houston
Education: B.A. in Mass Communications from North Carolina Central University
Family: Husband and two daughters
Residence: Atlanta
AJC Her+Story is a new series in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlighting women founders, creators, executives and professionals with in-depth profiles and stories exploring important topics. AJC Her+Story is about building a community. Know someone the AJC should feature in AJC Her+Story? Email us at herstory@ajc.com with your suggestions. Check out all of our AJC Her+Story coverage at www.ajc.com/herstory.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Report for America are partnering to add more journalists to cover topics important to our community. Please help us fund this important work here.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
