Fighting Climate Change And The Coronavirus By Cutting Waste

German-Lebanese entrepreneur Dan Khachab co-founded Choco in 2018 to address the rampant waste in the food chain. Khachab, who splits his time between Berlin and New York, estimates 40 percent of all food produced gets wasted, all while driving climate change.

“Food waste is the third largest driver of climate change,” Khachab said. “We cut down rain forests to grow food we don’t need. There are about 7 billion people. We have enough food for 10 billion, but we’re not capable of routing food efficiently through the system.”

Khachab proposes to help solve this enormous problem with digital tools that make transactions between food suppliers and their customers more efficient. Having worked as a chef, Khachab knows how it works from the inside.

Suppose for a moment he is a German chef in Vermont, Khachab said. He sits down at 11 p.m. after a long, hard day to order his supplies — from 11 suppliers, calling them every day, leaving 11 voicemails.

“It’s a repetitive process for me,” Khachab said. “It takes me one and a half hours, every day.”

Now consider the suppliers at the other end of those voicemails.

“Suppliers wake up at 3 a.m. to listen to hours and hours of voicemail,” Khachab said. “I’m a German chef with a heavy accent. It’s hard to understand me. A lot of mistakes occur.”

Even if you take away the heavy accent, there’s a lot of room for error with such an inefficient system, Khachab said, and restaurants often end up with the wrong product.

“There is no return,” he said. “If you get the wrong item you throw it away, it’s perishable. It’s not like Amazon.”

Using the Choco App, a chef can place her daily order in 10 minutes on the subway ride home, Khachab said, and on the supplier end, it’s all there in black and white, with no room for interpretation or misunderstanding. In just two years, more than 10,000 wholesalers and producers around the world have adopted the Choco App to receive orders.

“It’s much more convenient for the supplier,” Khachab said. “He knows exactly what has been ordered, which has massively reduced waste.”

Choco is currently doing business in nine countries, with a focus on Europe and the United States, and has just under 200 employees. In the beginning, Khachab said, he had sales people going out to talk to restaurants and suppliers, but lately word of mouth alone has been driving adoption of the app.

With the coronavirus pandemic shutting down the restaurant business worldwide, Khachab has established a new business called Choco Market to help out his suppliers by creating a way for them to sell directly to consumers. He plans to give any profits directly to restaurants so they can cover fixed costs while they’re locked down by the authorities.

“The nice thing is Choco Market is completely in line with our vision, because if those suppliers didn’t sell their food it would be thrown away,” Khachab said.

Starting in New York City in mid-March, Khachab set up additional Choco Markets in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, and is considering adding more cities both in the United States and Europe.

Mike Longo, owner of Krystal Fruit & Vegetables on Long Island, has the following testimonial on the Choco Market website: “Choco helped me set up my webshop. I went from having $800,000 in unsold produce and almost firing my team to sending out 500 orders per day and hiring more people!”

Khachab is undecided whether he will continue with Choco Market after the coronavirus has released its deadly grip on the world, or if he will return to his core business only, working behind the scenes to cut waste out of the food chain by streamlining and digitizing the relationship between restaurants and their suppliers.

“It’s certainly not our core business, but if there is value and it helps our suppliers we’ll continue doing it,” Khachab said. “If not, we’ll stop.”

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