A startup company located in Hoboken has been utilizing the power of technology to help people find restaurants that utilize more sustainable practices. Ribbit is a service founded by Stevens alumni Matthew Cristaldi as Co-Founder and CEO, Evan Bedser as Co-Founder and CTO, and Matt Rota as Lead Developer.
The work of the team at Ribbit is directed towards maintaining and improving our ecosystem by promoting restaurants with sustainable practices.
According to Cristaldi, “Almost a third of all the food we produce in the US ends up in the trash and about 40% of that comes from the restaurants […] Ribbit works with local restaurants, local farms, and people like you and me to provide a platform that brings everything together.”
With the food industry being one of the most wasteful in the world, it’s important to take steps to waste less by getting food from sustainable sources. The company was born out of a need for an easy way to find sustainable restaurants. Cristaldi states that “Ribbit was an idea I came up with while on vacation in Costa Rica with my girlfriend in Spring 2018. We were hopping from town to town on the west coast when I noticed a familiar pattern in many of the restaurants – they served a lot of local food, told us where the ingredients came from and stressed the importance of using reusable materials to keep waste out of their oceans and rain forest. It was a refreshing experience, especially when we visited other restaurants who didn’t do this and served us tons of plastic – it really put things into perspective of how much plastic we use and the fact that most of the time we have no idea where our food comes from.”
In order to reproduce this level of environmental awareness and locality back home, Cristaldi and Bedser began workshopping ideas, and landed on Ribbit.
Protecting the Earth is an important part of Ribbit’s mission statement. Cristaldi claims that “it’s important to look out for our planet because it’s the only one we have. Some of us are really lucky that we’re not faced with drought, food shortages, polluted air, or excess heat like millions of other people around the world. What I love about building Ribbit is meeting the hundreds of other companies who understand that we’re on a path that is leading toward devastation and we need to innovate our way out of it […] now we have the opportunity to hit the reset button and build a more sustainable economy and infrastructure – one that doesn’t lead to millions of people around the world dying each year from air and water pollution.”
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