A couple dozen Sacramento startup founders and innovators ignored the forecast for heavy rain yesterday and came down to Impact Venture Capital downtown for another 1 Million Cups Sacramento to hear the latest two startup founders present their pitches; Ernst Bertone Oehninger, founder of Freedge and Kaleigh Stover, founder of ShopTalk.

Freedge

freedge is a nonprofit that promotes the installation of community fridges [public refrigerators] that are used to share food and ideas at the neighborhood level. It’s a sharing mechanism aiming to reduce food waste and build a stronger community.

Despite the tremendous amount of resources devoted to the production and transportation of agricultural products, approximately one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted each year. Much of this waste occurs at the household level—residential disposal of food waste accounts for 31-39 percent of total food waste in middle and high-income neighborhoods.

Reducing food waste through redistribution at the residential level is a ‘low-hanging fruit’ with the potential to simultaneously address goals related to environmental and economic justice. However, there are currently few solutions that address food waste at the residential and neighborhood level. Our project aims to address this gap through creating networks of people who are passionate about reducing food waste and strengthening relationships with neighbors, while providing local sources of food for community members who may face food insecurity.

HOW ?

A community ‘freedge’ is a place where members of a neighborhood can share food and ideas. The Freedge is a community refrigerator hosted by a resident or groups of residents and placed in a public space. Anyone can take or leave any food item in it, subject to local health and safety regulations. Each Freedge is unique, but all share the common goal of reducing food waste and redistributing food.

How can the community help freedge?

ShopTalk

Coffee shops are the new offices, people go there to work. We believe there is a huge opportunity for connection with the people working around you in coffee shops. That is why we created ShopTalk, an app that connects you to the people working around you. ShopTalk encourages real time, face to face connections so that you can network or collaborate or just who that is that’s typing away next to you.

ShopTalk solves two unique problems, the first is for the coffee shop customers who go there to work or study. They are heads down into their computers/books and are missing valuable opportunities to connect with other professionals around them.

The second problem it solves is for the coffee shops. We found, by talking to over 100 people at 9 coffee shops, that on average people go to coffee shops to work or study 2-3 times a week, stay for an avg of 2 hours and only spend $4. ShopTalk encourages customers to spend more money by sending them out push notifications with deals for drinks/food at the coffee shop they’re sitting at.

 

How can the community help ShopTalk?