Our Story
2015
Our founder, Matt Jozwiak has been in the food industry for almost all his life. He started as a dishwasher in Kansas and made his way up in the kitchens. He completed his professional culinary training with Pierre Orsi in Lyon, France, and worked at a number of notable restaurants around the world, including Auberge de L’ile Barbe in Lyon and Noma in Copenhagen
He moved to New York City in 2015 and became a station chef at Eleven Madison Park. While working on a program to teach youth how to make nutritious food he realized access was extremely challenging and began working on a solution to bridge the gap between the billion tons of food that goes unused and the millions of people that face food insecurity.
2017
In September, Matt started looking for part-time work as a private chef to save money to start the organization while still ensuring a living. Bill Fradin, who is still Chair of our Advisory Board made a substantial gift.
Rethink was launched in October and with the help of Aron Pobereskin we cooked our first Rethink Meal during our pilot run. In the months prior, Matt worked with co-founder Evelyn Kim to put together the board and structure of the organization. Dominique Day filed the paperwork for Rethink Food NYC, and Pietro Colina and Alex Pfaffenbach helped create the first fundraiser. Matt's father and sister were on the original board, and Lisa O'Sullivan provided guidance for Matt and the newly formed organization.
We rented a small commercial kitchen we shared with a catering company and we began collecting donated excess food from the NoMad, Eleven Madison Park, and Make It Nice. We collaborated with the restaurants run by Chef Daniel Humm and then-partner Will Guidara to develop our very first standard operating procedures to safely utilize those in need. Chef Humm’s team helped us develop the systems we use today.
2018
This year, we received our first big financial contributions from a small group of supporters. That year we had around 6 employees on our operations team. We further scaled our operations with additional trucks, expansion of our routes and had the ability to collaborate with more partners.
2019
In April we hosted our first Rethink annual gala at Eleven Madison Park. Thanks to fundraising efforts and substantial donations, we could further scale our operations: we added more trucks, did more routes, and started collaborating with corporate partners. In July of 2019 Matt left his full time job to work at Rethink full time. We were focused on creating a certification for businesses who wanted to donate their excess food in a safe and sustainable way.
By the end of 2019, we had grown into a $1.6 million organization, partnered with 25 food donors, and prepared and distributed 250,000 meals through 12 CBOs.
2020
2020 presented unprecedented challenges for underserved communities and many small businesses, including restaurants. When the pandemic hit neighborhoods across the country, it inevitably led to two crises: the rise in food insecurity and restaurant closures. We reached out to our friends at Eleven Madison Park and Daniel and Matt put together a system to help restaurants create meals for local communities. During this time, Matt asked Daniel to take on the title of co-founder.
As restaurants were starting to close one after the other, we were facing a challenge of our own: we were beginning to lose the source of all the excess food from restaurants that we repurposed.
We leveraged our knowledge in food rescue and distribution and launched our Rethink Certified Program in April 2020 in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Its goal was to provide food access to our local neighbors while supporting struggling restaurants at a time when they needed it most.
In 2020, we rescued 400,000 lbs of perfectly good food to prepare nutritious and culturally sensitive meals. Together with 60 Rethink Certified restaurant partners and 119 community-based organizations we prepared and distributed more than 2,400,000 healthy meals for local communities in 2020.
