Trusting your gut instinct

Founded by Michal Garvey in Auckland in 2018, Foodprint links customers with food outlets that have goods at risk of going to waste.

Through an app, eateries can list surplus or imperfect food at a discount of 30 percent or more off the regular retail price. The company takes a commission on each sale. Customers can locate the eateries via the app’s map feature.

The business has a network of 350 eateries and 97,000 customers. Garvey says Foodprint is on track to hit 100,000 customers by the end of November.

Rather than following the “traditional” funding route, Foodprint was self-funded. However, Garvey’s participation in Creative HQ’s Climate Response Accelerator brought with it $20,000 equity-free funding, which enabled the business to expand into Wellington in 2021.

Since then, the company has received waste minimisation funding from various regional councils, facilitating its growth into other regions, including Hamilton, Raglan, Cambridge, Te Awamutu, Lower Hutt, Nelson, Tasman, Christchurch, Lincoln, Rolleston, Ashburton and Timaru.

Garvey continues to focus on national expansion; Tauranga is next, joining Foodprint in November.

To date, Foodprint estimates it has prevented an equivalent of 115,000kg of carbon dioxide emissions entering the atmosphere. 

“In a cost of living and climate crisis, there is no good reason to be wasting food,” she says.

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What do you wish you knew starting out that you only learnt along the way?

Everyone tells you is that it’s going to be hard, but it’s so much harder than you could possibly think, particularly as a solo founder. Every challenge within the business – decisions, or anything [else] you have to do – lands on your shoulders. A lot of the time, it’s things you haven’t been previously exposed to in past careers.

I will stand by most of the decisions I’ve made, but sometimes you are put in a position where it might, in hindsight, not necessarily have been the best choice.

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Can you tell me something that went wrong and what you learnt from it?

Obviously, we partner with hospitality businesses, and I know everyone’s really sick of hearing about Covid-19, but the impacts that has had on businesses are huge and, in some circumstances, still ongoing.

For FoodPrint, we were only about six months old when Covid first hit our shores, and I found I was going from record days to a dashboard full of zeros. I learnt you have to ride the wave – that there are things that you can do to pivot and change during that time.

Right before we went into the first lockdown, we pivoted the business so that eateries could use us for all online ordering – not just food at risk of being wasted. For me, that was a no-brainer; we had a platform, we were nimble, and we could make these changes.

But I learnt quickly that it wasn’t what our customers wanted from us. I was getting all of these negative emails asking us ‘why wasn’t the food discounted?’ Saying that the food wasn’t at risk of being wasted, so what were we doing? That we were a ‘cheap Uber eats’. It was bizarre.

When I would explain that we had pivoted to provide an opportunity for the eateries we work with to support them during Covid, the response would then be, ‘that’s a wonderful idea. Congratulations to you.’

It goes back to what I said earlier: all of those decisions are on my shoulders, and sometimes they’re the right thing to do at the time, but not necessarily the right thing in the long term.

‍[Foodprint has since returned to the pre-lockdown model of discounted surplus food. While Garvey says the pivot was a “great opportunity to test other waters”, it did not feel like the right change for the company and its mission permanently].

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Who did you work with through this process that’s been helpful to you?

I have been lucky to participate in a couple of accelerator programmes, which I would encourage other founders to apply for.

The first one was a mini-accelerator programme run by the Sustainable Business Network in 2019 – they actually denied my first application, but someone else wasn’t able to make the pitch day, so they called me up. So, that was an amazing six-week programme right before Foodprint launched that was helpful in terms of calming me down and getting me set up.

Then, in 2020, I participated in the Sprout accelerator programme, which ran out of Palmerston North. Having a weekly mentoring session [with Sprout] through the pandemic was an absolute lifesaver; I don’t know if I would have made it without that.

I also did the Creative HQ Climate Response Accelerator in 2021, which came with funding.

In terms of mentoring, I don’t think I ever held on to one person as my specific business mentor. Instead, I built a network of people who I can go to at different times for different things.

I’ve found that one of the important things with mentorship is ensuring that the person providing you advice is the right person for you and the business. Make sure you take the time at the start of any mentoring relationship to consider if the person aligns with your objectives, and if it’s not right, don’t be afraid to pull out.

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What is the best piece of advice you've received?

It sounds clichéd, and I couldn’t even tell you who gave me this advice, but it is really trusting your gut and going with it. Nobody knows your business better than you, and nobody will ever know your business better.

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What was your first entrepreneurial moment?

When I was in primary school, Mum used to do the invoices for Dad’s business. I would get paid probably one cent per envelope to fold invoices, put them in the envelope and put the stamps on. So, I think that was probably my first foray into making any money.

Then, when I was in high school, I did a lot of babysitting. I would hustle to find families to babysit for with neighbourhood flyer drops and stuff like that.

For me, it was never really a case of ‘if’ but more of ‘when’; I knew from a young age that I didn’t want to work for somebody else my whole life.

When I started talking about Foodprint with friends, family and strangers on the street, I would get all of these comments – ‘you’re so brave,’ or ‘you’re crazy; I could never do that’ – but, I’m really lucky because I grew up with a dad who’s an entrepreneur, so he normalised it for me from a young age.

I think a lot of the time with startups it just comes down to timing. The timing for Foodprint just happened to be now.

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‍Founder Feedback is a weekly series asking founders about their startup journeys. If you have a story to share, reach out to mary@caffeinedaily.co

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