Entrepreneurs are often lauded as heroes who bring economic activity to their neighborhoods. But sometimes in the drive to grow and contribute and add jobs, they adopt business practices that have the potential to exploit communities, either in their hometowns or in far-flung countries around the world.
This can even happen in the food industry, despite fast growth not always being a primary goal. Ingredient and equipment supply chains are fraught with environmental harm and inequitable workforce practices. Meanwhile, low margins can make it tough to adopt other solutions.
Three food-focused companies in Philadelphia are working to flip the script.
“We’ve been driven by the feeling that we’re taking on something bigger than us.”
Alessandra Aste, Food Forest AI
Each has a different approach to the biggest question facing ethics-driven entrepreneurs in the food ecosystem: How can they create space for the most disenfranchised while also addressing the industry’s systemic inequities?
These companies’ leaders see ethics not as a nice-to-have, but as the foundation for growth — and they’re using technology, real estate and community-centered hiring to prove the approach can work.
Food Forest: AI mapping to cut waste
Inefficiencies in the food supply chain can be a major cause of waste, and a lack of collaboration is often to blame.
Philly-based startup Food Forest AI is working to change that by directly connecting food and beverage brands to manufacturers and ingredient suppliers.
Each of the three cofounders, Alessandra Aste, Gabriel Spiller and Avery-Dante Hinds, saw demand for better sourcing and distribution channels, they said, but found no existing B2B platform meeting the need. So they built one.
“Food and beverage is incredibly energizing,” Aste told Technical.ly, “because it’s simultaneously one of the most tangible levers for tackling global scale challenges and it’s also an industry where everyday eaters (like us) often create change faster than regulators. “From day one,” she added, “we’ve been driven by the feeling that we’re taking on something bigger than us.”
Food Forest uses AI to structure food company data by various metrics, including capabilities, certifications, product catalogs and facility types. The goal: Create an interconnected map that closes gaps and creates a regenerative loop in our collective food system.
Aste believes finding the balance between mission and need is essential for entrepreneurs.
“It’s essential to choose an issue that genuinely drives you, something you can tap into when everything else feels uncertain in the startup trenches, but it should also be an issue people urgently need solved,” she said. “After seeing supply chains fracture [again], we know that building tools to create more pathways between food and beverage companies isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a missing layer of our food system.”
Jasper House: A building where business meets community
Kensington’s Jasper House is more than just new apartments and artist studios. Built around a community garden, it was conceived as a hub for BIPOC-led food businesses.
“Philly is such a foodie town — there is so much opportunity to connect over food here. With the initiatives I lead I think about amplifying the things happening in Kensington,” said Lindsay Bedford, Jasper House community manager. “We want to support the narrative that Philly is a place to be, beginning here in Kensington.”
On the ground floor of the building, Christa Barfield’s agricultural enterprise FarmerJawn is focused on the reintroduction of farming into the lifestyles of urban people through CSA shares, farm placement and education.
Steps away, Nikisha Bailey and Matthew Nam’s Win Win Coffee, the city’s first Black woman-led coffee roaster and distributor, works to create opportunity and equity in the coffee world, both locally and in farming cooperatives across the globe.
Both occupy what might otherwise have been empty retail space in the mixed-use building, thanks to the “mission-driven” development consortium of Southwood Properties, The HOW Group and Sterling Wilson.
The setup offers residents access to fresh food, and a direct connection to the people producing it.
Out West: Second chances served daily
On 52nd Street, a corridor that’s often considered a food desert, Out West offers healthy grab-and-go meals with a side of social impact.
More than three years in the making, the cafe is modeled after James Beard Award-winning restaurateur Muhammad Abdul-Hadi’s earlier venture, Down North Pizza. Like that pizzeria, Out West plans to offer second-chance employment to people reentering society after incarceration.
Its location on “the strip” between Market and Locust was intentional, with the goal of serving both neighborhood residents and commuters.
The approach reflects Abdul-Hadi’s belief, he said, that a business’s influence must extend beyond its bottom line, and can succeed while embedding ethics into its ethos from the ground up.
