Student startup aims to limit food waste in restaurants

In the virtual classroom setting of “Innovation in Engineering and Design for Global Crises,” Mallika Jain, Elisa James, Elina Xie and Dea Kurti were challenged to develop an innovative product or service to help solve an issue that was caused or exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. It was in this class, taught by David Gerber, Brad Cracchiola and Daniel Druhora, that the four students began to design their startup company, Refresh LA. 

Refresh LA is an online marketplace that connects surplus food from local restaurants to “price-savvy, eco-friendly customers.” The main goal of Refresh LA is to reduce food waste, in turn also reducing carbon emissions and landfill capacity. The company, which launched on Feb. 8, also aims to support small businesses.

With Refresh LA, the students aim to remedy issues of food waste and decreased sales in the restaurant industry. At the end of each day, local restaurant partners like Dulce, Pot of Cha, Factory Tea Bar and Honeybird inform the team what food items they have left over after their sales. Refresh LA then alerts their customers about the leftover food through text, which is sold to them at a discounted price. 

While researching a topic for their assignment, the group of students recognized how large of a problem food waste is in the United States. Especially during the height of the pandemic when many people were forced to stay at home, restaurants experienced significantly lower sales, resulting in large quantities of wasted food. 

“During COVID, a lot of restaurants were experiencing lower foot traffic and thus decreased sales, so we really thought about this and figured out a solution to serve as a lifeline for small businesses, while also mitigating big picture food waste,” Xie said. 

Customers can shop the food options on Refresh LA’s website and are sent a confirmation email of their purchase which they can pick up during a specified time window. While customers receive delicious snacks at unbeatable prices, restaurants make additional earrings from food that otherwise would have been wasted.

Kurti, a sophomore majoring in industrial and systems engineering, has a deeper motive behind the company than just sustainability. As a New York City native, she witnessed food being wasted in considerable amounts everyday. Additionally, as the daughter of a small business owner, Kurti understands the impact of a company like Refresh LA.

“My dad owned a small business and when COVID hit, I kind of understood the implications of what that meant for small business owners. My dad was not able to work or to have his employees work for several months,” Kurti said. “As a person who is being raised by a small business owner, that aspect was really important to me and being able to help out small business owners was really incredible.”

After using their passions to establish the company’s foundation, the founders of Refresh LA began to reach out to local businesses in the USC community. Their first partner was Cafe Dulce, which decided to use the profits made through their partnership with Refresh LA to support students struggling with housing and food insecurity during the pandemic. While Refresh LA is currently based out of South Central, they hope to expand to other urban areas and college towns. 

“We started looking at areas where we could have the most impact and really just [realized] we were USC students, we had the most connection to USC places,” said James, a senior majoring in industrial and systems engineering. “Then we got a few partners on board, then started marketing to students … and then it’s just grown to have more partners and more customers.”

Refresh LA has also partnered with several USC organizations, such as Trojan Shelter, USC Student Basic Needs, the Sustainability Project, Food SC’ience and Nutrition Club, the Environmental Student Assembly, Students Innovating for Global Challenges and the USC Panhellenic Council, to promote their company and sustainability efforts to other college students. 

“[One] reason that we’re targeting collegiate towns is that word of mouth between friends and between a community spreads a lot quicker than trying to spread the word in a whole city,” said Jain, a senior majoring in computer science and business administration. “The more organizations we can reach out to the better, we have this chance of reaching every student at USC, which is ultimately our goal.”

Despite some initial obstacles in getting restaurant partnerships, Refresh LA credits much of their success to those who have helped them through the process of launching and expanding, especially their app development and design team. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering has also provided the group with immense support, in addition to James Choi, the owner of Cafe Dulce. 

“[James was] our very first partner, and [was] so open to meeting with us and talking with us about how we can be successful, how a business model can run [and] telling us the inner workings of the restaurant industry so we could create a product that would really support restaurant owners,” Jain said.

Refresh LA’s founders are full-time students who manage their own business, and are remaining involved in other organizations on campus. Despite their involvement with Refresh LA being time consuming and demanding, the founders know the greater good that comes with it. 

“There are some weeks that are really stressful, everything’s a time crunch, we’re all working all hands on deck … and those weeks are probably the most difficult with the stress of creating your best work in such a limited amount of time but Refresh is like our baby, we all care about it so much [and] we’re so invested in it,” Xie said.