2025 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit
June 23-25, 2025 | Seattle, WA
Hyatt Regency Seattle
Jessica Regan
Bio:
Jessica Regan is an award-winning 4x entrepreneur and thought leader on circular economy, waste recovery, and social impact business. Jessica also consulted/advised numerous Fortune 500 corporations, start ups, and all four levels of government, including the United Nations, in areas of community economic development and sustainability.
Jessica's work concentrates on developing highly scalable startups using business as a vehicle for social change, including: EcoTrek Tours (connecting schools to local environmental initiatives through tourism), Social Impact Technology Accelerator (SITA), and FoodMesh, a food recovery solution provider that leverages technology to help a network of over 2,500 organizations reduce waste to landfill, save costs, and feed more.
She is the Vice Chair of KASOW, a Kenyan-based charity focusing on health, agriculture, and microfinancing for entrepreneurs, and serves as the Director for the Git'gaat First Nation Economic Development Council focused on economic self-determination through culturally-aligned economic activities.
She holds a master's degree in political science and lives in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband and two young children.
Schedule
Thursday, May 21
9:00am - 10:15am
“Home Grown: How Place, Culture, and Policy Are Shaping the Future of Food Waste in North Carolina—and Beyond”
Mainstage
Welcome to North Carolina, a state with a food story that is richer, more complex, and instructive than most. This session uses North Carolina as a lens through which to examine food waste from angles that rarely share the same stage: we’ll share research on household food waste patterns across the state; shine a spotlight on Black farmers and cultural foodways and the role of heritage and community food traditions in shaping the broader food system; and host a conversation about how new policies ripple through food culture—and how food culture, in turn, shapes what becomes politically possible. From farm to kitchen to community table, North Carolina offers a vivid illustration of how place-based knowledge, cultural identity, and policy momentum can reinforce or undermine one another—and how you can move the needle when you take the whole picture into account.
Also during this mainstage session, we’ll introduce a panel of founders/CEOs to the stage who will share candid reflections on what it took to grow their solutions from early-stage ideas into mainstream impact—offering hard-won lessons on how innovation and investment align for success.