Working on his MBA at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Ricky Ashenfelter stumbled upon a great idea. Within the entrepreneurship program, Ashenfelter studied sustainability, entrepreneurship, and innovation, learning about green technology and the food industry. In this program, he met his future co-founder and CPO Emily Malina. Together, they worked on the idea of Spoiler Alert throughout the MIT program and in their free time, slowly investing their time, energy, and resources to progress the idea into a sound, feasible venture. After graduating, Ashenfelter and Malina brought on a third cofounder as CTO and were able to work full-time on Spoiler Alert. Since that time, June 2015, the company Spoiler Alert has grown tremendously and impacted countless lives.
Spoiler Alert is a self-identified “venture-backed technology startup” that “empowers the world to minimize food waste.” Spoiler Alert’s product is a software package that is split between an analysis and tracking program for food businesses, and an open platform to facilitate food donations and waste recovery. Spoiler Alert works to connect and open communication between all kinds of organizations: food rescues, food banks, homeless shelters, local farms, restaurants, and other food businesses. In this way, they efficiently decrease food waste and charitably promote the donation of food.
The driving motivation behind Ashenfelter is undeniably his desire to decrease waste and contribute to the local, regional, national, and global welfare. Ashenfelter witnessed firsthand the enormous amount of waste within our society and the enormous need in other parts of both our society and of the world. He was then able to utilize his impressive education and skills to help solve this issue and make the world a better, less wasteful place. Beyond this, Spoiler Alert’s genius comes in the fact that it deals with the problem of waste both before and after it occurs. By providing a tracking and analysis program, Spoiler Alert seeks to help food service businesses minimize the amount of waste they currently have. The second part of the company’s software allows the excess that inevitably occurs to be efficiently reallocated and utilized rather than becoming actual waste in a landfill. Overall, Ricky Ashenfelter and Spoiler Alert are doing a fantastic job promoting and sharing an abundance that would otherwise be wasted.
What a genius idea! The problem of food waste is huge, and solving it could positively impact so many lives. I know of restaurants who have had to throw away huge amounts of food because of various laws or miscalculations, and at the same time I know there are so many people within our own states who are desperate for food. Ricky Ashenfelter is a good reminder that even huge problems can be tackled if we truly put our minds to being innovative.