Zomato acquires non-profit Feeding India, aims to end hunger and food wastage in India and globally

As part of its Corporate Social Responsibility, Gurgaon-based Zomato India has announced its acquisition of Feeding India, a not-for-profit organisation, to deal with issues of hunger and food wastage.

Zomato will fund the entire salaries of the team and some core initiatives while Feeding India will continue to be a non-profit.

The development of the ‘Feedi.ng’ app represents one of these initiatives and is an app that will connect donors and volunteers at scale anticipated to serve at least 100 million underprivileged individuals monthly.

In addition to helping revamp Feeding India’s website, Zomato will maintain transparency by publishing quarterly financial reports on the website.

Feeding India was founded by Ankit Kawatra and Srishti Jain in 2014 with the purpose to work on solving complex challenges of hunger, food wastage, and malnutrition in India.

In a recent interview with YourStory, Founder and CEO of Zomato, Deepinder Goyal said regarding the acquisition,

“Food wastage in India happens at multiple levels – harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging and consuming. Someone has to do something significant to address this core issue of our country. And we think we can contribute to easing the pain.”

“We have now begun a new, and a more concrete chapter around serving the underserved by acquiring Feeding India. It is an important step for us, as both organizations share a common dream of ending hunger and food wastage — not just in India, but globally,” he added.

The partnership between Zomato India and Feeding India was first announced in February earlier this year. In Zomato’s blog, it was also announced that it would be helping to power Feeding India’s already existing sustainable models to help solve one of the biggest challenges that India faces – sustainably feeding 20 million people who go hungry daily.

In addition to donating excess food from various venues like events, airports, weddings, restaurants, corporates, etc. that would otherwise go to waste, Feeding India also cooks fresh food through innovative kitchen models to help support those with limited access to food and nutrition, especially women and children.

Four years ago, Feeding India’s team was comprised of only two people. Its volunteer base has now grown to over 8,500 volunteers, works in more than 65 cities through 12 food recovery vans and more than 50 community refrigerators.

After commencing its collaboration with Zomator, Feeding India expanded its services from distributing 78,300 meals monthly in December 2018 to now distributing over 1.1 million meals per month.

Additionally, the number of cities that Feeding India actively works in has risen from 65 to 82 and the number of volunteers, known as Hunger Heroes, has increased from 8,500 to 21,500.

Originally published by: YourStory.com