The first-of-its-kind initiative helps innovative solutions scale their potential to address food waste and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

[Seattle, WA, June 25, 2025] - Today at the 2025 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit, ReFED, the U.S.-based nonprofit working to solve food waste, announced the next cohort of grantees to receive funding through its Catalytic Grant Fund, a first-of-its-kind initiative designed to support food waste solutions with catalytic funding that can unlock outsized impact. The latest open call, Maximizing the Harvest, focused on supporting organizations providing solutions to address the 17 million tons of fresh produce that goes unharvested or unsold on America’s farms every year.

The five grantees selected offer solutions spanning automated harvesting, on-farm cold storage, and new sales channels for surplus produce and byproducts. These organizations and their projects receiving support are:

• Feeding New York State will conduct a statewide assessment of over 3,000 farms to identify untapped surplus produce in collaboration with Matriark Foods, and outline opportunities to convert it into shelf-stable, culturally relevant food for food-insecure communities. The resulting roadmap will be publicly shared to support broader efforts to reduce on-farm surplus.

• Fieldwork Robotics is deploying autonomous harvesting robots—beginning with raspberries, one of the most labor-intensive crops—to reduce food loss caused by labor shortages and delayed harvests. With support from ReFED, this marks their first U.S. deployment and a key step toward scaling in the U.S. market.

• Freshealth is transforming underused High Rise Broccoli stems into ready-to-eat products for K–12 schools, creating a new market for farmers while reducing on-farm waste and improving access to healthy food.

• Nutri8 is developing a mobile, modular rapid freezing system that enables farms and processing sites to preserve surplus or imperfect produce directly on-site—reducing spoilage and expanding access to secondary markets.

• Retaaza is a woman and minority-owned B Corp and social enterprise. They are building an intelligent cloud platform that connects farmers with institutional buyers, streamlining the sale of surplus produce and supporting the company’s expansion into new regional markets.

Since 2022, the ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund has provided nonprofit and for-profit organizations with recoverable and non-recoverable grants coupled with tailored post-grant support to advance initiatives with high impact potential as measured by food waste reduced and GHG emissions reduced. In the United States, 31% of the 237 million tons in our food supply goes unsold or uneaten, and nearly a quarter of that surplus food occurs on farms. This open call, supported with funding from Ballmer Group, UNFI Foundation, Argosy Foundation, and others, will provide the five grantees listed above with a total of nearly $1 million to advance their solutions for on-farm surplus. Building upon its knowledge of capital and innovation in the food waste space, ReFED developed the Catalytic Grant Fund as an easy way for funders to quickly make an impact in reducing food waste via a pooled financing vehicle that provides patient, risk-tolerant, and flexible capital to solution providers.

“Early investment in on-farm food loss solutions is typically hard to come by—these innovations often face significant barriers to adoption, making them less attractive to funders despite their enormous potential for impact,” says Angel Veza, Director of Innovation Initiatives at ReFED. “That’s why catalytic funding is so critical: it helps de-risk new ideas, validate models, and unlock the capital needed to scale. With well over 100 applicants for this open call, the five selected grantees stood out for their high-impact solutions to food loss at the farm level—and we’re thrilled to support them in advancing their work.”

“We chose to contribute to the Catalytic Grant Fund because we believe in the power of catalytic capital to unlock big impact,” says Kristine Creveling, Senior Manager at the UNFI Foundation. “By pooling resources with other funders, we knew our dollars could go further—and the innovative, on-farm solutions selected through this process prove just that. Supporting these grantees advances UNFI Foundation’s mission to foster a more sustainable, resilient food system, starting at the farm level. We're excited to see how they transform the future of food waste reduction.”

To stay updated on the ReFED Catalytic Grant Fund, click here.

To learn about all five grantees and the impactful work they’re doing, visit the Grantee Directory.

If you’re interested in contributing to the Catalytic Grant Fund, please contact Angel Veza, director of innovation initiatives at ReFED at [email protected].