2025 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit

Dan founded California Safe Soil, LLC (CSS) to find beneficial ways to recover food from supermarkets for beneficial use in organic fertilizers and petfood ingredients. Unlike alternative technologies, like anaerobic digestion and composting (which allow food to rot and ferment) this technology – enzymatic digestion – captures the nutrient value of recovered food. CSS raised the venture capital to build a pilot plant in West Sacramento, California in 2012, followed by a commercial scale plant in McClellan, California in 2016. After years of successful R&D, CSS expects to scale up its technology significantly over the next year. Dan was previously global head of energy and infrastructure finance for CIT, with a team of 40 professionals in New York, Toronto and London, with a focus on technologies for the adaptive reuse of waste. Dan received his MBA in Finance from the Tuck school at Dartmouth College in 1979, and his BA from Yale University in 1977.