“How a Former Trader Joe’s Executive is Creating A New Grocery Store Model that Offers Healthy Food and a Dignified Experience to Combat Hunger”

Interview with Doug Rauch, Founder of Daily Table

In this week's interview, we hear from Doug Rauch, former President of Trader Joe's and Founder of the innovative retail nonprofit, Daily Table.

Doug’s 31 years of experience growing Trader Joe’s Company from a small, nine-store chain to a nationally acclaimed retail success story paved the way for his market-savvy approach to tackling food insecurity with Daily Table. Determined to find a scalable, dignified response to hunger, Doug developed a nonprofit retail storefront business model that sells surplus, high quality food from manufacturers, distributors and growers at a deep discount. By removing the economic barrier to healthy food and making good food competitive in price with fast food, Daily Table wins the repeat patronage of their customers and consistently provides excellent products at affordable prices.

With plans to expand this model to more stores in the Boston area, Doug is looking to redesign tax incentive policies so that food recovery is encouraged throughout the food industry, and calls upon social entrepreneurs to continue applying their innovative business ideas and technologies to help alleviate food insecurity within their communities.

Alexandria Coari from ReFED and Amy Ahearn from +Acumen sat down with Doug to understand how he has applied lessons from his extensive retail career to build an enjoyable shopping experience that promotes dignity and helps low-income customers access nutritious, affordable food.

Download the full interview here!

The full interview can be downloaded here. Be sure to follow along as we release additional interviews with our Expert Network members as part of the Accelerator Expert Network Knowledge Series.

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The Accelerator Expert Network Knowledge Series highlights interviews with members of the ReFED Nonprofit Food Recovery Accelerator's Expert Network, representing a diverse group of food businesses, capital providers, government agencies, technology companies and food systems subject matter experts. Given the Accelerator's aim to catalyze ideas and inspire actions that will lead to a doubling of healthy food available to the 40 million Americans facing food insecurity, a new interview from an Expert Network member will be released each week throughout the course of the 3-month program, running from September - December, 2019. Each interview can be downloaded here.