DoorDash’s company-wide Project DASH (DoorDash Acts for Sustainability and Hunger) initiative tackling the issues of hunger and food waste is on pace to donate six million meals to people facing hunger by the end of the year. Since launching the program four months ago, DoorDash has donated 1.8 million meals to hunger-related nonprofits with the help of its restaurant partners through both food recovery and “one-meal for one-meal” donation efforts. As part of the program, the company has also rescued more than 10,000 pounds of excess food, utilizing its logistics technology to deliver unused food from restaurants to local shelters and food banks.
Project DASH bolsters the company’s mission of delivering good with a three-fold approach: through its Food Recovery efforts helping restaurants donate excess food to local shelters and food banks; One for One Meal Donations, and WeDash for Good, a program where every DoorDash employee “dashes” monthly and funds earned are donated to local hunger relief organizations in the communities DoorDash serves. DASH has expanded beyond the initial pilot, with food rescue programs currently in place in cities including Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, San Jose and Washington D.C.
As part of its partnership with Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization, DoorDash Drive API technology is now integrated and is helping to power Feeding America’s MealConnect platform.
DoorDash is the first Feeding America partner to utilize its drivers—Dashers—to deliver MealConnect retail food donations to the Feeding America network of food banks and their partner agencies. DoorDash provides valuable logistical expertise between partnering restaurants’ surplus food with local Feeding American distribution sites, which receive the donations.
“Delivering good is not just a tagline we use—it’s the sole purpose of Project DASH and is integrated into the very fiber of what DoorDash seeks to accomplish everyday,” says Tony Xu, co-founder and CEO of DoorDash. “We’re proud of our first-of-it’s-kind integration with Feeding America’s MealConnect, allowing more restaurants to deliver excess food than they could before by providing our logistics technology that helps to power the platform.”
The average restaurant has over 100,000 pounds of excess food annually—and only 1.4 percent of that is donated. The partnership is aiming to address food waste while serving the local communities.
