Copia Review – Should You Join The Fight?

Copia is the new name for Feeding Forward. The company uses technology to encourage businesses to give away unwanted food to communities in need. Here’s our Copia review.

What is Copia?

Copia – formerly known as Feeding Forward – is a platform that promises to give meals to communities in need. In order to do that, Copia has created an app that enables businesses to receive a tax write-off and a reduction in disposal costs for providing meals to communities in need.

It works kind of like Uber for food deliveries. In fact, the interface will be immediately familiar to anyone who has used Uber before.

Using the app, Copia claims to help businesses make money (through tax deductions and reduced disposal costs) while also effortlessly feeding those in need, strengthening the community, and protecting the environment.

The system is currently available throughout the Bay Area of San Francisco, where it’s seeking to develop a strong following before expanding across America and around the world. The ultimate goal, like all food recovery apps, is to solve global hunger.

How Does Copia Work?

Businesses can request a pickup of surplus food through Copia, then a driver will come pick it up. Businesses can track where their food is used and who it feeds.

On the receiving end of things, Copia lets people sign up online and place their preference for the amount and type of food you want to receive. Then, you wait for a match and connect with your driver to receive a food delivery to feed your community.

Copia Service Areas

Copia is currently available throughout the Bay Area of San Francisco. Specific cities served by the company include Mountain View, San Francisco, Santa Clara, Palo Alto, San Jose, Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland.

The company is seeking to expand to new cities. They encourage you to tweet a request at them to let them know you want Copia in your city.

You can request a donation (or pickup) any time Monday to Friday from 8am to 9pm PST. The latest time to submit a donation request is 8pm PST.

About Copia

Copia is headquartered in San Francisco. The company was launched after founder and CEO Komal Ahmad was walking on the UC Berkeley campus one day when she was approached by a homeless man asking for money to buy food. Instead of giving the man food, she invited him to lunch. The homeless man told Komal his story: he was a veteran who had recently returned from serving in Iraq. Since his benefits hadn’t yet kicked in, it had been three days since his last meal.

Then Komal realized that right across from this conversation, the UC Berkeley dining hall was throwing away thousands of pounds of food every month. She saw two problems that needed to be solved: the homeless man was hungry and the school was wasting food. So she set up a program at UC Berkeley that allowed school’s dining halls to donate excess food to local homeless shelters.

Over time, this became Feeding Forward, which then rebranded as Copia.

Copia aims to be different from other food recovery organizations by providing services on-demand, delivering data analytics, and being fully scalable. As the company’s Our Story page explains,

“The bay area is our first step on a path to end global hunger.”

To date, the company claims to have recovered 600,000 pounds of food and fed 720,000 people in the Bay Area. It has also saved Bay Area businesses $3.6 million. The company is headquartered at:

237 Kearny St. #9036
San Francisco, CA 94108

You can get in touch with the company using the online form here: GoCopia.com/contactus

How to Use Copia

You can get started with Copia by heading to their website and clicking Start Here.

You can sign up as a corporate sponsor for Copia by emailing [email protected] with the subject Corporate Sponsorship.

You can also sign up to join Copia as a driver, in which case you get to drive around (with a cape – seriously) and deliver food to people in need. You can start your application process here.

After you’ve joined the platform, you can install the app from here. To install that app, you’ll need to enter your email address and zip code (or login with Facebook). Or, you can install it directly for iPhone here or Android here.

From there, you can start donating food to help feed hungry people in your community.