Sacramento Startup Profile: Brianna McGuire, Founder of Foodfully

A daring expedition into the depths of my refrigerator recently revealed some exotic and disgusting, long-forgotten produce. Every reader has no doubt encountered some downright scary specimens in their fridge that they immediately toss into the garbage or compost pile. Food waste is a big problem. American consumers throw away 25% of what they buy of any food. Every year Americans throw away more than 74 billion pounds of food. According to Brianna McGuire, Founder of Davis startup Foodfully, this mostly because they have either forgotten about what food items they had or they’re not really sure how to cook something they know they have. She and her team have developed an app-based hardware and software solution called Foodfully that helps to eliminate household food waste.

Foodfully links with your grocery store loyalty card so it can track your purchases, send notifications before your food goes bad, and connect you with cooking tips, recipes, and locations of nearby food banks so you know how to either cook or donate your item.

I initially saw Brianna pitch at a 1 Million Cups Sacramento event in early December and was impressed by both her enthusiasm and passion about solving the problem as well as how they are addressing it with their Foodfully app. I reached out to her for an interview, and even though she’s visiting family in North Carolina for the holidays, she graciously took the time for a phone interview to talk about the food waste problem, her background, what it’s been like developing her startup, as well as some thoughts about supporting female founders here in the Sacramento region. You can check out the interview in the YouTube video below, which essentially just an audio file of the recording, or download the audio file as a podcast from the link below.