Matthew Tortora

Co-Founder & CEO, Crave Food Systems Corporation

Providence

"In 2010 After serving nearly 10 years in the U.S. Navy as a Nuclear Missile Technician, I made the decision to pursue a career I could find a passion for. Beginning with my insatiable appetite for delicious and healthy food and a natural ability to cook (pretty well). I decided to become a chef. In 2015, I left the left the kitchen after experiencing so many challenges and barriers to building a truly farm-to-table operation to found a food technology and marketing company called Crave Food Systems. Typical supply chains just sucked. No chef wants to put Sysco or US Foods on their menus and the consumer demanded more and more local products and a right to know where it was coming from. If I wouldn't feed that food to my children, how could I sell it to other people? Chefs had little options to make the farm-to-table menu work, let alone, efficiently. We launched WhatsGood in April 2015 with the focus on connecting local food purveyors to independent restaurant chefs. Shortly after, we began helping schools and institutions source more food locally and even helped a few win USDA grants. We became obsessed with a worthy mission to replace absolutely terrible food (I mean disgusting) in schools, with more fresh, healthy, and local food. A year later we would build our first virtual farmers market in order to increase the convenience of accessing local, healthy, food and empower farmers markets to meet the new demands of the retail market by getting in the eCommerce game. Combined with a model that allows the American farmer growing real food, to receive 100% of their sales price, with no credit card fees, and increase profitability at the same time. I find myself drawing on years of leadership experience and resourceful problem solving skills gained in the military and my up-bringing to help guide me to build the team and technology necessary to change our food system in a positive direction and set the course to a significantly more sustainable and localized one." -Matt