A Hyperlocal Food System for San Francisco
San Francisco has surplus food, neighborhood kitchens, talented cooks, growers, businesses and community organizations ready to help.
Gatherly SF connects them—creating a hyperlocal food system designed to make healthy food more accessible, reduce waste, create local opportunity and strengthen the city’s resilience.
An initiative led by Replate
Conceptual network · illustrative
~0
San Franciscans experience food insecurity
0+ tons
of potentially donatable edible food enters compost or landfill each year
~0%
of available surplus is currently recovered
Food insecurity in San Francisco exists alongside extraordinary abundance.
Businesses have food they cannot use. Kitchens sit underutilized. Residents want opportunities to cook and grow food. Community organizations know what their neighborhoods need.
Today, these resources operate through fragmented systems.
Gatherly connects them.
The System
Gatherly connects the people and infrastructure that already exist across San Francisco into a coordinated local network.
Selected
Neighborhood Hubs
Processing kitchens where ingredients become meals and products.
Instead of building everything from scratch, Gatherly activates what San Francisco already has.
Tap any part of the system · Data flows across the entire network
How It Works
Businesses across San Francisco generate high-quality surplus food every day. Gatherly connects donors, recovery organizations and community partners through shared technology and coordinated logistics.
Food that would be wasted becomes a community resource.
Neighborhood processing hubs connect rescued food with kitchens and local cooks. Surplus ingredients can become nourishing prepared meals or upcycled products instead of going unused.
These hubs also help address a simple reality: access to ingredients alone does not guarantee access to a meal.
Surplus becomes meals, products and opportunity.
Gatherly connects rooftops, yards, gardens and other growing spaces with residents, organizations and urban agriculture expertise.
Local growers can supply neighborhood hubs while creating new sources of fresh food and local income.
Unused space becomes productive local infrastructure.
Gatherly creates a shared data layer across recovery, processing, growing and distribution.
That data can help communities and public agencies understand where food is available, where needs are changing and where interventions can create the greatest impact.
Better information leads to better decisions.
The Closed Loop
Gatherly is designed as a feedback loop.
Food supply informs processing. Community demand informs what gets prepared. Consumption informs what gets grown. Data improves how resources move across the system.
The result is a food system that becomes smarter and more responsive over time.
Our Five-Year Vision
0
neighborhoods
with improved food access
0M+
pounds
of surplus food rescued annually
0+
local cooks
creating affordable food and economic opportunity
0+
urban gardens
across the city
0+
acres
of new growing space
0+
pounds
of locally grown produce
Living-wage jobs
across rescue, processing, cooking, growing and food-system management
These figures represent Gatherly SF's intended five-year outcomes and will be measured and refined as pilots are implemented.
Why This Can Work
The infrastructure already exists.
San Francisco has thousands of permitted food businesses, community organizations, commercial and community kitchens, urban growing spaces, retailers and residents with the skills to participate.
Replate has spent a decade building food recovery infrastructure in San Francisco and beyond—including logistics, partnerships, data systems and technology for matching surplus food with community needs.
Gatherly builds on that foundation.
A decade of food recovery experience.
Matching, prediction, routing and data tools already deployed in real-world operations.
Experience working across businesses, community organizations, logistics providers and public agencies.
Policy + Momentum
Gatherly SF is emerging at a moment when California and San Francisco policy are beginning to reshape how surplus food, urban agriculture and neighborhood food production work.
Rather than creating an entirely new system from scratch, Gatherly connects these policy tailwinds into one coordinated food system.
Unlocking the supply
Businesses are increasingly responsible for keeping edible food out of the waste stream.
California’s SB 1383 requires covered businesses and organizations to recover and donate edible surplus food rather than discard it.
For Gatherly, this creates both a reliable source of recoverable food and a reason for businesses to participate in—and help fund—the infrastructure needed to move that food efficiently.
BusinessSurplusRescue Network
Unlocking local production
Public investment is creating new opportunities to grow food inside California’s cities.
The California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Urban Agriculture program provides funding to support urban growing projects.
Gatherly can connect this growing capacity with neighborhood hubs, cooks and local demand—turning urban agriculture into part of the broader food system rather than a collection of isolated gardens.
SpaceGardenLocal ProduceNeighborhood Hub
Unlocking local commerce
San Francisco already allows urban growers to turn what they grow into economic value.
SF Ordinance 66-11 allows qualifying urban agriculture operations to sell locally grown agricultural products.
Gatherly connects growers to processing hubs, cooks, retailers and consumers so locally grown food can move through a functioning local market.
GardenProduceHubNeighborhood
Unlocking local talent
Home cooking can become part of the neighborhood food economy.
California’s AB 626 created a framework for Microenterprise Home Kitchen Operations, allowing jurisdictions to enable residents to prepare and sell meals from permitted home kitchens. San Francisco is working to enable home cooking operations under this framework.
For Gatherly, local cooks could become an important bridge between recovered or locally grown ingredients and affordable, culturally relevant prepared meals.
IngredientsLocal CookPrepared MealNeighbor
Connect the four policies
These policies were not designed as one food system. Gatherly connects them into one.
Gatherly provides the connective infrastructure that allows these individual opportunities to reinforce one another.
Why This Matters
Passing laws and creating programs alone does not coordinate pickups, kitchens, cooks, growers, retailers and community organizations.
Gatherly provides that missing coordination layer.
The opportunity is not simply to implement four policies independently. It is to use them together to create a more resilient local food economy.
The rules are changing.
The resources already exist.
Now we need the system that connects them.
Built With the Community
Gatherly is not designed around a centralized institution deciding what communities need.
Community organizations, residents, cooks, growers, rescue operators, food businesses and public agencies each hold information the system needs.
The model creates ways for these participants to shape how food moves through their neighborhoods—and creates paid roles for community members wherever possible.
Business Model
Most emergency food systems depend almost entirely on charitable funding.
Gatherly is designed differently.
Over time, the system can generate revenue through activities including:
Philanthropy can build the infrastructure. Economic activity can help sustain it.
Roadmap
Year 1
Map food businesses, rescue capacity, kitchens and growing opportunities. Pilot a coordinated food recovery network.
Year 2
Expand recovery and launch the first neighborhood processing hub and cook network.
Year 3
Move toward citywide food rescue while piloting coordinated urban growing.
Year 4
Expand processing hubs, cooks and growing operations across additional neighborhoods.
Year 5
Connect recovery, processing, growing, distribution and data into a citywide network.
San Francisco can become a model for what a resilient urban food system looks like.
The Network
Conceptual illustration · not actual operating locations
Gatherly's goal is not to create one centralized facility. It is to create a distributed network that works neighborhood by neighborhood.
Built on a Decade of Experience
Replate was founded in San Francisco to build a better way to move surplus food from businesses to communities.
Over the past decade, Replate has developed technology, logistics systems and cross-sector partnerships to professionalize food recovery.
Gatherly takes the next step: connecting food recovery with processing, local cooking, urban agriculture and shared data to help build an integrated local food system.
Leadership
Founder & CEO, Replate Inc.
Founder & Project Lead, Gatherly SF
Education & Recognition
Maen Mahfoud will lead Gatherly SF, bringing lived experience, systems thinking, technology, public health and food-sector leadership to the work.
Having immigrated to the United States with firsthand knowledge of how food systems operate in the developing world, Maen has long understood that powerful innovations can also move in reverse: resource-efficient, community-centered models can inform solutions in wealthier cities. He explored this concept of reverse innovation in his graduate thesis and later published the work through The BMJ.
In 2016, he founded Replate after seeing enormous food abundance and food insecurity existing side by side. He grew it from a Bay Area idea into a technology-enabled food recovery platform operating nationally and internationally. Replate has generated more than $10 million in philanthropic and earned revenue, worked with 2,000+ business partners and 800+ nonprofit organizations, and created more than $75 million in economic value through recovered meals.
Gatherly SF is the natural evolution of that work: moving upstream from recovering surplus food after waste occurs to redesigning how cities grow, distribute, process, preserve and reinvest food from the beginning. His experience positions him to help San Francisco develop a model of urban food infrastructure that can ultimately be replicated by cities around the globe.
Inventions
Published Work
Board & Affiliations
Board Member, Ideagarden Institute
Gatherly SF will require businesses, community organizations, cooks, growers, kitchens, technologists, funders, policymakers and residents working together.