 Hi, this is Jan Reardon here representing the Jennifer Reardon Foundation, which I have the absolute pleasure of being able to represent and keep my sister-in-law, Jennifer Reardon's mantra of being kind, loving, caring, and sharing right in the forefront here in Vermont, definitely out in Albuquerque and as we're finding throughout the United States and actually even globally. So it's heartwarming and under the circumstances it's as good as it can be without her to still have her presence and feel her spirit means a lot to us. So that's the gist of the show is to be able to bring people to the table that support the four pillars of our family foundation, the Jennifer Reardon Foundation, the things most near and dear to Jen's heart, women's empowerment, financial literacy, early childhood education, and community vitality. So this is community vitality at its best once we get talking and people can find out. I am so excited to be here with the two of you. John Cronin is a great friend of mine and I'm so happy to have you here. And then Ken, I'm just meeting you for the first time and it's such a pleasure and you're the marketing lead for the company that we're going to be talking about HarvestWeb.org which John is the founder of and I've had the pleasure years back of meeting John over at White Cap in Williston where he had his business iCapital and my understanding is 1500 patents have gone through under your guidance at iCapital. So if we could start perhaps by number one, thank you for being here but introducing yourself in your way and talk a little bit about that if you would and then we'll go to you Ken and talk about the marketing lead part of HarvestWeb. Absolutely. Well sure, thanks. Yeah, my company IP Capital has been around for 25 years and we've helped tens of thousands of inventors invent. Myself has 1500 patents and applications. So it's all about inventing. It's all about inventing and HarvestWeb got started with this sort of flash I guess where I've been always interested in trying to feed the hungry even since there's a little kid. When I grew up without a lot of means that always meant something to me. So as I started to invent all sorts of stuff about five or six years ago I started thinking well why can't feeding the hungry, why can't you invent feeding the hungry? And we started off thinking it was a new business model that maybe there was a way to have charities be self-sustaining meaning that instead of raising money every year for a charity was there a way to develop a charity that could actually self-sustain. So that gave birth to kind of the HarvestWeb. How long ago did this all start? I know you said when you were younger you wanted to do this but like truly like begin the you know implementing different things to have it happen. How many years are we talking here? Well it's five years now and I'm not ashamed to say that we had four or five false starts because when you're inventing something obviously your first idea out of the box doesn't work. So we had a lot of failures. We start off trying to grow hydroponic gardens to make money and then use the proceeds to feed the hungry. That was a brilliant idea but we tried to connect grocery stores with churches that had food drives and try to automate that. That didn't work. We tried to figure out a way to automate the whole cycle between givers and churches and grocery stores and food shelves and all that. That just became too complex. So we finally simplified this down with the help of the team to try to figure out a way to connect directly. Anybody who wants to donate directly to a food shelf and give the food shelf the money rather than getting involved in all the stuff in the middle. So that's kind of how it now is. That's what we're going to find out more about and before we go over to you Ken let me just ask you a couple of questions John. So how would a food shelf become part of this? Is that because say I want to donate to the Essex food shelf. Is Essex there? No, maybe not. So how do they get involved? Well initially what we're doing is the marketing to go to food shelves to explain the program and say how would you like to check every time we can get one. They don't seem to resist that. So we have a couple of food shelves right now that Ken will talk about. But in our website we have a way where anybody could plug in a food shelf. So that's automated. Fantastic. Okay, so let nice segue over to Ken here if we can talk about these food shelves and how you have approached them and how the response has been and even explain if you would the whole process. Okay, let me try to do that. Thank you. So what we do is we've tried to establish a network for food pantries and food shelves. As we looked out into the, I'll call it the market of food pantries and food shelves we realized that all of them had two things that they were concerned about. One was donations, usually money or food and the other was volunteers. We have volunteers on hold for right now and we're working on donations. I see. And so what we've done is established harvestweb.org, which is a website that allows you to donate to a food shelf of your choice. If your food shelf is not in our stream of food shelves, so you go to a little check box and you find it. Yeah, he's got the website up. Oh, there it is. Thank you, Kevin. He told me you could do that. There's a look here, right? So there's two tools. You can see the locator. Could you click on the green locator button there, Kevin? So there's a national map. Okay, well, that answers that question. Yeah, and that was provided to us by another organization. We're very grateful for that because it would have taken us 150 years to do that. So there's a number of local food shelves in every community really throughout the country. And then there's a second channel. Kevin, if you could go back to that one step back. Let's see if we can do that. I'll talk it through anyway while he's working on that. And that is called recommend a food pantry. Oh, okay. So if you frequent a food pantry, either. There it is right down below. You just scroll down a little bit. There it is. Very nice. That's a great feature. Exactly. You just fill in that form. And then we approach that food pantry. We say, you know, you have a client or you have somebody that's sympathetic to your organization. They recommend it that we reach out to you. And then the sign up procedure is very, very easy. It's really one form. We need to ensure that food pantries are 501C3s because we're 501C3. Right. Which, of course, is important. Definitely. Your donation is tax deductible. And we reach out to them and we say, would you like to join the network? And really, all they have to do is fill out that form, sign it, and return it to us. Okay. So Ken, what are the logistics? How does the food? If somebody do that. It'd be witch-tiered with a twitch of the nose. Like, we added these food. Is it, you know, teleported across? I've seen the groceries plan. That's such an excellent question because that's where we made all the mistakes. Okay. We constantly try to figure out how to get some money to go buy the food, to deliver at the food shelf and all the rest. You're charged to the grocery stores. And with the branch of the team, the other volunteers, and Bill Peters, for instance, is running harvestsweb.org, and some of the other volunteers like Charles Root and others, we got together as a team and recognized, you know, why can't we just, like I'm doing a one-click, like Amazon digitized, you know, the retail space, why can't we just figure out a way to get a donor to put their money directly, 100%, directly to the food shelf. Right. Without anybody in the middle. Right. And the food shelf knows best what to order. That community wants. Yeah. Exactly. And their inventory at that time. Most people that donate food will go to the grocery store and just pick up what they think they can do. Exactly. It might not be. And that's not healthy enough. Right. The community needs exactly. And this keeps it neighbor to neighbor, which is something that we want. Yes. One of the things that we do that I think set us apart quite uniquely is we turn over money to the food shelves very, very fast. So we say give on Monday, it's at the food shelf on Thursday. There it is. And that, you know, if you give through a social media tool or something like that, it can be a fairly long process. Oh, I'm sure. We do one other thing, though, that we think is quite unique and really makes us distinctive. And that is, we don't take anything from the donation. So if somebody gives $10, the food pantry gets $10. Okay. So that, you're segwaying into my next question where, how is this funded? How does this happen? Yeah. That's a great question. One that we ask monthly. It's funded in through a second channel, which is called Support Our Mission in the Website. Okay. And so if people look and they love the idea and they want to support what we're doing, they can support at various levels. Wonderful. Oh, I love it. They can support us. There it is. Oh, very nice. So become a sustaining giver. So those odd numbers work out to about $250, $500, and $1,000 a year. And of course you can give it any level you want, like any level. And those gifts, of course, are tax deductible, so as you would hope. There is a check box just for kind of full disclosure. When you give a donation to a food pantry, you can check a box to pass along 6% to us. Oh, that's a nice great option. So it's the person's choice. Exactly. Right. And one of the things that we believe about the whole process is that food pantries are just incredibly efficient in terms of your donation dollar. Well-oiled machine. Yeah, exactly. More businesses should be run like that in the retail world, right? Yeah, exactly. So if you give, you know, it's truly a charity that if you give $20, you're giving a significant amount. That's unheard of. Exactly. Except for the Jennifer Rudin Foundation. My brother has the same exact philosophy, so I respect that entirely. I think you probably joke at the food store like I do. I walk out and I look in the bag, and the manager looks at me and I say, not bad. I got my $20 worth of food for $54 this week, right? And it's like, that's where it feels right now. And that was just the eggs, right? Right, exactly, yeah. So, you know, we live in a time when $20 through Harvest Web to a food pantry can be a meaningful difference. And that in itself is the beautiful part of this, where obviously you want to give as much as you can, but to know that $20 will make a difference feels good, because sometimes you give it's like, is this really going to, it could be a hundred bucks to a different organization. Is this really going to matter? But here you know for $20 you could break down how many meals somebody will be able to have. Exactly. My son was telling me when he used it the first time that he's in his thirties and for people like him, you know, just to figure out where to go and to donate. Right. At the time. And then maybe you have to research, you may have to go buy the food and all this stuff. And so one of the for instances is, you know, say it's Thanksgiving and you're sitting there having a cup of coffee in the morning and you say, you know, I want to give something. Exactly. You just log on the website, you know, which is a mobile website, you can just give $20 right there and you're done. Right. And you don't have to figure anything else. Exactly. Yes. One of our people, Bill, likes to say give, click, go, you know, I mean like thing. But it's fast and it's clean. Which is so important. Yeah. Exactly. Right. Now, one of the things that we're doing is we're getting some other investors in, because that's 6% is still 6%, and that's covered, you know, by other donations of I Know Worth People. So we're, we've designed this so that it could be like a franchise. In other words, you could say be in Albuquerque. Right. And if you had just a modest amount of funds to supply some marketing, you can just get this website for free. I love it. And you just, it's like a franchise. It's a great concept. Yes. So you could just start a charity. Right. Everything is done. You just need to finance a little bit to get it going. You need a marketing person. And then you'd have the rights to that territory. Yeah. They'd still be part of our network. Exactly. The part of our network, but they could create their own subnetwork. Right. Just like any franchise. Right. Right. That's very interesting. Once this works, we can scale this globally. Right. Right. That's the point of this. I noticed, you know, in our notes here that we had talked about the fact that it will be global someday, which makes perfect sense. I mean, of all things to go global when it ties into food is a given. Right. Absolutely. Let me see who gets my next question here. How many food shelves, you would probably notice that you go to the food shelves directly, but can how many are there in the network right now? Oh, right now, just a handful. Right. Right. We introduced our website at the end of October, so we've been sort of up and running over a short time. You can really sit down and realize, yes. I'm happy to tell you, though, that we've already delivered checks to food pantries already. Happy to us. And I think we're scheduled to deliver another one Monday. When we get our automation in place, then that'll happen electronically. And the upside of the automation is not to take people out of it, because frankly I enjoy visiting the food pantries and seeing what's happening. Oh, and have that relationship. But it's to turn it fast and to keep us, to keep our costs under control. So the difficult thing with a traditional charity is as you scale it, you need more people. We've tried to design HarvestWeb so that as we scale it, we don't have to add a lot of people. In other words, we don't have to add a lot of overhead. That's not where it's at core, and then it can just go from there. And then earlier you had mentioned volunteers, and that's not a big part yet, but that would I would imagine end up being quite a need, no? Could I tell you about our people? Because that's my favorite part of the company. So we're led by, you've mentioned Bill Peters. Bill, we've grown organically up to now. So Bill and I have about a 20-year history together from my semiconductor years. Bill was a subcontractor to us, and we became good friends. So I think you can connect the dots from there. And then Charles Root was an employee of yours who's got a technology background. So he became a very natural fit for the technology piece of the website. And we originally were working on an app, which we haven't given up on yet. We have a mobile-enabled app, a mobile-enabled website. But we'd like to still develop an app at some point in the future. That was a little bit prohibitive in terms of expense and that sort of thing. So I came along, then Charles and Bill were already in place. I bought in a former coworker of mine named Brenda from Carl Sushiers. And she actually, after Sue, she went to a small company up here, Cure Green Mountain. Oh, yes. And she became a very expert in software and project management. And so she was a perfect fit for what we needed. And it's obviously a great team because I love the website and it's so user-friendly. Thank you. So we say that sometimes we analogize to being Vermont-based or New England-based. We analogize to for an all-wheel drive car going up a snowy hill. Until we had all four wheels going and driving, then we could move forward. We reached a sort of critical mass. Yes. And there's another aspect of that that I think is beautiful. And that's that at any given time, I have no idea which wheel has the most traction. It could be any of us. We're very cross-functional. Yes. We're very devoted to the mission. Go left, you go right, and go back and forth. We communicate with each other a lot, both on a business basis and on a friendship basis. Very nice. And so working, it's like a dream. That's beautiful. It is a beautiful thing. Right. What was nice is to find the volunteers, and then we got to the point where we could pay them, and now we're bringing on more volunteers. So it's got a nice to have a core team. Exactly. Right from the beginning of implementation. So this might be a ridiculous question, but is there anything like this anywhere else in New England or in the United States? Can I answer? Yeah. Right. But that's what I'm wondering. I mean, we did sort of research on this when we first started, and we didn't find anything like this current model. Right. And I was just wondering more about the concept versus, I mean, you are so in-depth as far as the technology part of it and how seamless it is that it's sort of like Uber versus the taxicab. You know, there's things that you just are so far ahead with that nobody could catch up. But I was just curious if there's some version of this that exists because there's obviously such a need, and there has been for a long time. Yeah. One of the things, we have a lot of future plans, but there's a lot of churches, for instance, that have donation systems. Yes. And what we see is we can come in and replace that donation system and automate it so that they can just connect the donor directly to the food shelf and not have to worry about collection. Or be a middle person. Right. Exactly. So we attend and approach churches. We're approaching companies that actually do the same thing, which is there are a lot of companies that will say, if you donate this thing on our website, we'll give so much back. And so we want to put this same system. Inside of many other ways to feed the hungry. That is fabulous. A question that I had in talking about Harvest Web with a couple of my friends recently is, would there ever be a time that there could be something in place for schools? So they have their food. They have their whole menu for the month and all that. But there are some children that that's all they get. So they'd love to know that there could be like a snack shelf or something so that they could and not make a big deal about it, but kind of slip, you know, some popcorn to somebody. Yeah. Well, since we have the foundation now, right, just adding another app on this app. Exactly. Another need. Right. You know, and we'd be happy to entertain any of those kind of really good. OK, well, we can maybe connect on that afterwards. I'd like to find out. And and also with that ask you either one of you, maybe start with John, what are your plans as far as like when you say to go global? What does that look like to you? Well, one of the nice things is in my business, I happen to be a global. I'm a CEO and I meet CEOs of all sorts of companies all over the world every day. And so it isn't hard for me to reach out to them. And I've already tried this to talk about the concept and then to say to my friends, you know, you're you're there in Switzerland. You know, would you like to try one of these things out? How perfect that is a matter of transferring software code. Sure. Right. So the idea is that with my network to start with, you know, we can get access to many different people that are running many different businesses across the U.S. and the globe. So I intend to use that network once we get this thing really running because I don't want to get people involved unless it really works. Right. Right. So we're doing pilots right now to figure out how many people will actually use this and do it and get all the bugs out. So what was, you know, kind of along those lines of what was the first aha moment of like, oh, wow, we didn't think about that. Was there one of those I know in the failures leading up to this. But now that this is launched, have you had to do any tweaking now that it's live? I would say that, you know, our posture is we're very much in a learning mode. So any surprise that comes our way, we think that that's that's good. Yes, absolutely. We're learning, if I can say it this way, what not to do. So we're kind of like an infant that's beginning to walk and we fall and skin our nose and we understand that maybe we don't want to do the stairs that way the next time. Exactly. But I don't think we've had too many gross disappointments. Fabulous. There was one thing that I bought with me from the semiconductor industry, and that was a principle that said everything takes longer than you think. That is so true in general. And that seems to be true here. Very. We have a couple of exciting things. I don't want to get ahead of your questions, but I'm excited. Just one more. So you go right ahead. Oh, thank you. One of the things that we try to do is we try to look at our various customers. So our customers would include the people that donate. It would include the people that support. It would include the food pantry. But it would also include the client of the food pantry. And we try to to reach that whole spectrum of people. And in doing so, we've developed a vision for a newsletter that we're going to call Nutrients, and Nutrients is going to reach to that final end user, that final client at the food pantry. And the reason for that is that the real core issue is nutrition. Exactly. It's not it's not can I get another bagel into you. It's can I get the right issue for energy. So speaking of volunteers, we had a volunteer come along who in the course of speaking to her, she said, oh, and by the way, several years ago, I went back to college and got a degree in nutrition. Fabulous. You got to understand it for a guy like me. Like dropping out. Exactly. I'm like, thank you. Right from the ceiling. Thank you. So. So it's wonderful to have those talent sets come our way. And we're looking forward to Nutrients really growing that area of our concern. Right. We also had another volunteer come our way that is expert in business process, a very, very competent in business process. Wonderful. And as you can imagine, we've grown this kind of by reaching here and reaching there and barring, you know, John, can I have this? You know, that kind of thing. So that person is going to help us document our business process. So when we go on to what John was speaking about a few minutes ago, being able to duplicate this somewhere else, we can say, oh, by the way, not only do you do this, but here's how you do it. Here's best practices and that sort of thing. Right. So we do feel, you know, we were very much aware that. Meeting the needs of the needy is a universally agreed good thing. And so we approach it, obviously, from maybe a Christianity standpoint, but we kind of feel that we get some help along the way because these things sort of fall into line a lot better than we could ever figure out. Very spiritual. Exactly. When somebody comes in, you know, four years ago, I did. I would be, yeah. You know, you just kind of like want to fall backward off your chair. That's true. And I should say one other thing about the team, because they're just wonderful people. I don't know how to describe it. That sounds maybe self-serving, but it's not. It's beautiful and it ties into, obviously, community vitality and being kind, loving, caring and sharing at the core of it. Because it's, you know, you are genuinely enjoying this adventure with these people to do something so wonderful that who would have ever imagined would be happening. Right. Exactly. So, you know, it's good on just so many levels. It is. So if somebody's watching right now, which we know they are, what could and what should they do? Say they, let's do a couple of scenarios. There's a person that has some funds that they would like to make a donation. Just really go right there, not even pick a pantry. Could you pick a pantry? Like say, I don't know that Hinesburg doesn't have any food, but you might know that. Well, there's those tools that I spoke to you about. That's true that I would be able to. Okay. There's also a square called Contact Us. Okay. So somebody could reach out and say, hey, I'd like to do the rest. Where they just wanted you guys to have the money to be able to just say, okay, let's kind of sprinkle it over here and there. Sure. Not just all about that particular food chef. Okay. So that's one way, right? Yes. And another way would be, I suppose, and there's a successful business person out there that would just love to start a charity to help feed the hungry like I did. And they think about how much trouble that would be. Or what, how do I do it? Where do you start? Where would I start? That person would just have to call me because that person would be a donator at a different level. It would be, how would you like to sort of be in charge of financing? Just a little marketing team and we'll give you everything else. And so now they have this instant. Great model. And they can name it whatever they want. So harvestsweb.org is the platform, but they could name it the read and food shelf. They could name it anything they want to. Very interesting. So they can put it in their name. Sure. And run it the way they want to. We are the platform to to give away. And that's the way this thing expands. So I wanted to do it big, but I didn't want to just do a small local thing because I saw how big this actually could be. Oh, right. I mean, the opportunity is so obvious. So two levels of donors, if anybody wants to. Right. And then they want to volunteer. Same type of thing. Just kind of contact us. So then there's that. And then if somebody is, you know, what would be another scenario that we could think of? If somebody has a food shelf, like I run a food shelf, I would go on there and I'd say, hey, you guys, come on over and see me Ken. Yeah, absolutely. I'd love a call like that. Or if you're feeling your heart, you just want to make a donation to feed somebody. Right. You can just, you know, one click away from doing that now. Right. And this is all through credit card? Yes. Is it anything like Venmo? I mean, what should people be prepared to do? Is it just... Right now, we're just credit cards. We're just a Visa MasterCard and that sort of thing. Venmo is a great idea. Oh, there it is. Yeah, that's our form. You put it in one time and then you just... It's saved. Good. Good, good. So it's pretty straightforward, pretty simple. If you're used to, you know, buying online, it's very much like anything else. Do you have an option, like for recurring, where you could just say, oh, I want to do it. Yeah, that one first thing I did, yeah. Good, yeah, exactly. I just want to do it once and that's it. It should be done, yes. Yeah, we'd love that. We'd love to accept it in any way that you'd want to give it to us. Can we have some other really cool things in the back burner that once it gets established that we can keep adding technology to? And one of the, for instance, and one of the false starts we got is we wanted to kind of put an iPad in every food shelf. And if we put an iPad in every food shelf, it would have its own software. And therefore, when the person that was receiving the food wanted to say thank you, they could just literally say thank you. Great means of communication. Directly back to the givers who gave the money. Yes, that's a nice feature. Very nice. The givers with the people that are receiving it. Right, because both feel good, you know? And I thought this was going to be really needed four or five years ago. Right now, there are more people headed towards these food shelves because of inflation, the economy. And mental illness and people that are not working and their lives have been turned upside down and this is the savior. Yeah, absolutely. Well, we are approaching the end of our 30 minutes here, which I can't tell you how much I have enjoyed. I mean, as I said, I went to the website so I was somewhat familiar, but just to hear a little bit more about the simplicity of it all, I just love the fact that you can hop on there for many different reasons and still have a great outcome. So this is community vitality and the Jennifer Reardon Foundation is very proud that we were able to have you on and be our guest because it means a lot to us to include great people in this process. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Please get involved, harvestweb.org, you know? Okay. Come visit our website. Say hi to us, send us a note, do whatever you'd like to do. We'd love to hear from anyone. Thank you. Very approachable, thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Oh, that was great.