Introducing the Capital Tracker

New Insights Engine Tool to Track Food Waste Investment

In 2022, ReFED launched the Capital Tracker, a first-of-its-kind , free resource offering a comprehensive deep-dive analysis of food waste funding at both a systems level and an individual deal basis to provide investors and innovators alike with the information they need to develop their food waste funding strategies. Currently tracking private funding, the tool will be expanded in 2023 with philanthropic and public funding data.

ReFED’s Capital Tracker analysis shows that nearly $9.14 billio n in private capital has been invested in food waste solutions over the last 10 years — inclu ding $1.55 billion invested in 2022 and a record $2 billion in 2021.

During the same period, the quantity and size of deals accelerated, with 2020 and 2021 seeing 111% and 110% year-over-year investment growth, respectively, as more funders recognized food waste solutions as a way to achieve their impact goals.

Alejandro Enamorado Capital, Innovation & Engagement Senior Manager, ReFED

“We’re encouraged by the increasing flow of capital into food waste solutions in recent years, but a significant funding gap remains. As ReFED continues our work to catalyze the additional capital that’s needed to scale solutions, we’re excited to share the Capital Tracker, an important new resource to support funders who want to use their capital to solve food waste challenges.”

Behind The Tool

The Capital Tracker is the multi-tool for the flourishing innova tion ecosystem. Whether looking to identify funders, better understand trends in funding, or build a deal fl ow pipeline, the Capital Tracker delivers with just a few clicks. Hidden beneath the simplicity is a complex p roduct and data challenge. Building the tool required identifying, scraping, cleaning, and processing datase ts pulled from Pitchbook. Mapping companies and deals onto ReFED’s solution types — prevention, rescue, recycling, and general — required manually classifying items one by one; when a company is classified, the system will automatically classify any future deals as such. Once the data’s structure was in place, we layer ed on functionality that allows for easy filtering and visualization. With a big update slated for 2023 to bring p hilanthropic data into the tool, the work is far from done. As the project lead, Alejandro and his team have been collecting user feedback, prototyping additional features, cleaning new datasets, and developing processes to make updates less cumbersome.