Why this Calgary-based entrepreneur developed the Uber of food recovery

By leveraging predictive analytics, Knead Tech helps reduce waste and bring nourishment to those who need it most.

When Lourdes Juan was growing up in Calgary, she wasn’t familiar with the phrase “food insecurity,” but she certainly knew what it was like to experience it. Juan grew up in subsidized housing and her parents, both immigrants, struggled to cover the costs of groceries. “It got to the point where my mom worked at a grocery store so we could get a discount,” she says.

Juan’s circumstances have changed, but the broader problem has become more dire over time. The cost of groceries has spiked at least 22 percent in the past four years alone, and according to Statistics Canada, about a quarter of Canadian households grappled with food insecurity in 2025. Food banks across the country have seen usage double since 2019. The existing resources are inadequate to meet growing demand — and they fail to address something that should be a basic human right, regardless of income, citizenship or housing status: access to fresh, healthy food.

Even though Juan has been thinking about these issues since childhood, she says it’s “a fluke” that she wound up tackling the problem head-on. After graduating with her Master’s in Environmental Design from the University of Calgary, Juan was working as an urban planner and developing her own small businesses (a spa and an urban design consultancy) in 2012 when she tagged along with a family member who was picking up a local bakery’s leftovers for his church. When they wound up with more than 200 pounds of bread — well beyond the needs of the small congregation — the two decided to drop off the extra loaves at an emergency shelter downtown.

Inspired by her bread-hauling experience, Juan, who’d connected with other nascent entrepreneurs in the city, began soliciting her cafe- and restaurant-owning contacts for food that would otherwise be thrown out. That led to the Leftovers Foundation, a Calgary-based non-profit dedicated to food recovery. Initially, Juan connected service agencies with vendors who had excess inventory and coordinated volunteer drivers. But as the scrappy endeavour evolved, she became increasingly frustrated with managing logistics and regulations and tracking data (like the volume of food rescued and the duration of volunteers’ shifts), all of which added unnecessary complications to a very simple proposition: bringing extra food to those who need it.

Around this time, Juan found out about Technovation Girls, an organization empowering high schoolers to develop apps for social good. Brad Rougeau, a software developer and Technovation mentor, helped the students build an app that The Leftovers Foundation used for years. In 2022, Juan and Rougeau decided to commercialize the software, which they dubbed Knead Technologies, so that it could be shared with charities struggling with similar problems.

Today, partner organizations across Canada and in four American states use the app to manage scheduling, ensure compliance with regulations, collect data and connect with donors. Here, Juan explains why the platform is a game-changer for this sector, why recovering food that would otherwise go to waste involves unique logistical challenges and why creating “the Uber of food rescue” became her passion.

I have to ask, why is the company called Knead?

Because it all started with that 200-pound bread pickup. I can’t take credit for the name. I wanted to call it Rise, like bread rising, but there was already another tech company called Rise. One of our intern software developers, Jesse, suggested Knead and we ran with it.

What big points of friction do food rescue non-profits face?

We’ve saddled a sector that has the smallest capacity and the least funding to solve this major problem: food waste and food insecurity. Moving food is laborious, and it has to happen in a certain timeframe, because 95 percent of what we move is perishable. So capacity and time constraints make it hard to rescue excess food from the landfill and give it to great causes.

Before, it was just me and an Excel sheet trying to organize everything. It became this beast of a thing I had to do at the end of the day, and it simply wasn’t efficient. There was no software customized for food recovery, so many non-profits are stitching together 12 different platforms to help organize logistics, and you’re kind of fitting a square peg into a round hole when it comes to your workflow.

Why were you motivated to create a business specifically to serve charities and non-profits?

From the beginning, it was really important for me to make sure that charities and non-profits are well equipped with software that makes sense. We’re asked to stitch together technology and funding for programs, which is really difficult when we don’t have the proper support. I don’t have a tech background, but I know that technology can really help with scaling. Our prototype helped the Leftovers Foundation become one of the largest food-recovery organizations in Canada. After that experience, I was like, “I wish everyone had access to this.”

Can you describe the nuts and bolts of how Knead allows food-recovery organizations to streamline operations?

We have a web-based platform where non-profits can set up all their pickup and drop-off routes, put in all their logistics measures and ask questions about the data they’re trying to collect. We also have a smartphone app for folks on the go, like volunteers or delivery drivers. While you’re picking up and dropping off food, it collects information that is sent in real time to the web-based app, so the organization can see if routes are being fulfilled, if there was food to pick up, if there wasn’t food, if a driver has an issue at drop-off — those types of things.

We use AI and predictive analytics to let food donors track patterns and see how much food they’re wasting. It allows folks to make informed decisions about ordering and how much stock they need at a certain time which can make a powerful impact in terms of food waste.

What sorts of logistics are involved in food rescue?

A lot of things that most people wouldn’t think about. Every province has food donation legislation that specifies, for example, that high-risk perishable foods like meat and dairy should not have a travel time of more than 20 minutes. So when we’re looking at organizations that could use that food, we have to make sure they’re not more than 20 minutes away. In some jurisdictions, [food] temperatures need to be taken, and it’s important for donors and drivers to know that they need to be equipped with infrared thermometers and then plug data into software like Knead. That way, when the reports are run, they can say, “Okay, this went from A to B, and it was under four degrees Celsius, and the travel time was 12 minutes.” That data can be useful for health regulators and it makes everyone more comfortable with food donation in general.

A lot of food gets wasted at conventions and other events. Is that an area that falls under Knead’s purview?

Yes, we do work with events through our customers. The NFL draft in 2024 in Detroit was a big one. We facilitated food rescue of more than 100,000 pounds over three days —our customer there was able to increase its volunteer base tenfold because it was so easy to sign up for routes. We were also part of the WNBA all-star game in Phoenix, where we worked with a partner organization that needed logistics technology for that one event.

Right now, we’re rolling out a marketplace feature here in Calgary to work with these sorts of vendors. We’re working with a casino to directly donate food to a few Indigenous charities. Or if organizers predict that 800 people will show up and only 400 come, they can post the excess on the platform and the charities in their orbit will be able to pick it up within 24 hours.

What are the challenges in raising capital for a company that focuses on clients who, as you say, have extremely tight budgets?

Fundraising through venture capitalists is not totally different from getting non-profit funding, and that was my main job as executive director at a charity: You make sure you make the connections and land the dollar, so you can make the impact. Venture capitalists are less interested in social impact and more interested in profit and growth. We had to find investors who were aligned with us, like BDC, the University of Calgary Social Impact Fund, and a fund out of Edmonton called Scale Good. When we first went looking for investments, I thought it’d be a slam dunk. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to close in six months — who doesn’t want to be part of this mission?” I didn’t close my round for 18 months after that.

What was that like?

It was a massive learning curve, probably the biggest of my career. I hated it. I wanted to be selling software and talking to food recovery agents across the planet! What really rounded out our cap table was a lot of passionate high-net-worth female investors and female colleagues in my network who wanted to support other female-founded businesses and have social impact.

You started out as an urban planner; you’ve opened a spa; you’ve run consultancies. Why are you so passionate about food waste?

In 2016, my husband, who’s a teacher, asked if the Leftovers Foundation could donate food to the city’s after-school programs — he found some of the girls drinking creamers from the fridge because they were so hungry. Having a healthy snack after school should be such a simple thing; it seems like a problem we should not have in 2026, and part of the problem is throwing away perfectly good food. There’s so many layers of food insecurity, and a tech company is not going to fix that. But if we can be one small puzzle piece that brings everything together, that’s a win.