When founders Page Schult, Adam Bailey and Max Olshansky created food waste reduction startup Topanga, they didn’t know they were inadvertently collecting some of the same data as delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash.

Topanga, the Culver City-based waste reduction startup, announced in late March it raised $8 million in series A funding led by Blue Bear Capital with additional participation from Santa Monica-based Struck Capital, Malibu-based Wonder Ventures and Amasia. Topanga has raised more than $12 million to date.

The company works with food service companies to generate sustainable packaging and limit food waste in kitchens and restaurants. But the data from that proved to be more valuable to consumers than previously anticipated and could be the key solution to an ongoing battle between restaurants and food delivery apps.

“It’s one of those unanticipated externalities of what we’re doing,” said Schult, chief executive of Topanga.

But first, the company

Reuse Pass, Topanga’s most well-known line, is a stack of reusable food packaging for takeout with a QR code stamped on it with instructions for consumers and a gamified digital arm that allows both users and companies to track how many packages are returned to the restaurants. The program is largely contained within campuses at universities (like Occidental College in Eagle Rock), companies, senior living facilities and hospital systems, where people are more likely to return to the same dining hall every day. Around 430 commercial kitchens are onboarded on to the program.

“It works a lot like checking out a library book,” Schult said. “…They get really easy SMS notifications about where and when to return their container, what the impact has been, and the fun gamification side. The operators get to remove the 60-cent compostable packaging that they were sending out to landfill with every order. They get to turn that into a cost-reducing recurring line of revenue.”

The data that came from the Reuse Pass program created Streamline, which allows companies to track demand for different kinds of food during lunch and dinner rush, reducing food waste in the process.

“We have found that even just our data, which is not designed to give you consumer behavioral data at its core, you now can see, ‘Hey, look, my Panda Express on campus does the most volume each day,’” Schult said. “You get more of those insights into consumer behavior.”

Privacy at the cost of insight

It’s the same consumer behavioral data restaurants are often blocked from seeing when customers order on food delivery platforms like DoorDash and Uber Eats through a web of privacy laws that have been enforced across several states. The Digital Restaurant Association, a hospitality-focused nonprofit linked to Ghost Kitchens founder Travis Kalanick, backed a bill in California that would require delivery aggregators to hand over customer contact information to restaurants.

Without that data, restaurants aren’t able to gain key insights on what food customers are ordering, where they live and how to make specific business decisions based on those demographics.

“They’re getting hit from every angle,” Schult said. “It’s rising food costs, rising packaging costs, raising labor costs. So a technology like what ours is and can continue to be which adds visibility, streamlines your efficiency in your kitchen, gives you that data to reduce your waste can really help with that bottom line.”

From B2C to B2B

The company was started in earnest in 2020 with a much different premise in mind. Husband and wife duo Schult and Bailey both worked in food packaging – Schult was working in compostables, leading e-commerce and operations teams and watching the word “sustainability” become a huge marketing driver for conscious consumers. Bailey worked at Jefferson Park-based Sweetgreen as a data engineering manager, keeping an eye out for ways the company could track money and food waste at scale.

Topanga started as a milkman-style market for farmers. As families became used to eating in instead of going out, and local farmers lost out on revenue from the shuttered farmers markets, the pair put together reusable boxes of goods sourced from farmers, which they would then pick up once a week to refill – much like the glass milk jars milkmen delivered. But as restaurants began to reopen, and walkable streets began to fill up with people once again, the company pivoted from a consumer-focused model to a business-focused one.