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Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross.

34 million Americans don't have enough to eat, and several million of them are children.

And it doesn't actually make sense when you think about it because there is more than enough food to provide for everyone every day.

In fact, 40% of all the food produced in the United States gets thrown away.

And a lot of that food is perfectly fine.

But every day, millions of tons of food are thrown out by restaurants, supermarkets, warehouses, catering companies, hotels, and corporations.

And many state and local laws make it really difficult to redistribute that food to people in need.

And to make matters worse, all that food ends up rotting away in landfills that then produce massive amounts of methane emissions.

Jasmine Crowe Houston is an entrepreneur who became obsessed with these very problems.

In 2017, she founded a company called Gooder, which works with businesses to take unused food and deliver it to those who need it.

Now, before Jasmine launched Gooder, she was running an agency that helped black celebrities set up charitable organizations.

And on the side, she set up pop-up restaurants and parking lots to serve free food to homeless people in Atlanta, where she lives.

That experience would eventually lead Jasmine to start Gooder.

You started an organization called Black Celebrity Giving. This was back in 2011, around the time that you were in the Shire MBA.

Tell me about that. What was the idea behind it?

Yeah, I have been a full-time entrepreneur, which is crazy to think about guy for over a decade of my life.

And I originally had this, almost a consultancy, where I was helping celebrities really define their giving blueprint, how they were going to use their star power for Good.

And I built hundreds of nonprofits, and I would create all their programming, help them do their board training, finding their board members, creating all of their program descriptions, and fundraising.

And one of the things that started to become a really repeat cycle for me, I realized I was really busy around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and back to school.

But other than that, the rest of the year, I was pretty much twiddling my thumbs.

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