Wal-Mart Stores’ FoodMaven wants to make a profit while reducing food waste
New York — Members of the Walton family, heirs to the Wal-Mart Stores fortune, are backing a start-up that thinks it can turn a profit by reducing food waste. The business, FoodMaven, has completed an $8.6m Series A fundraising round that includes financing from the billionaire Walton clan. The family office is Walton Enterprises, which holds nearly half Wal-Mart’s stock. The Colorado-based start-up, which went live in July 2016, is creating a marketplace to find buyers for food that has been rejected by retailers, for any number of reasons, but is still good to eat. An estimated $200bn worth of food is wasted in the US each year — largely the result of a food system this is inflexible, according to Patrick Bultema, FoodMaven’s CEO. "The industry has accepted waste as a cost of doing business" he said. "We’re making pathways that don’t exist in the food system." FoodMaven currently has about 700 customers in Colorado, including restaurants, hospitals and large institutional cafeteri...
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