2026 ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit

Ryan Begin is the co-founder and CEO of Divert, Inc., a circular economy company on a mission to prevent food from being wasted through nationwide infrastructure and innovative technologies.

Since 2007, Ryan has led the development of Divert, its solutions, and vision. The company provides an end-to-end solution that leverages data to prevent waste, facilitates edible food recovery to provide to people in need, and transforms unsold food products into renewable energy to power communities and fertilizers to enrich local soils. Through this integrated approach to reducing wasted food—Prevent, Provide, Power®—Divert works with customers across the U.S. to positively impact people and the environment.

Prior to his role at Divert, Ryan was a senior systems engineer and laboratory manager at Raytheon. Before Raytheon, he was a lead engineer at Proton Energy Systems (now Nel Hydrogen), where he delivered the first zero-carbon hydrogen system to fuel a fuel-cell-powered bus in Barth, Germany, and on-site hydrogen systems in Nikopol, Ukraine. His exposure to rapidly scaling decarbonization technologies, combined with his disciplined approach to product delivery from Raytheon, set Divert’s early technical foundation.

Ryan holds a bachelor’s and a master's in Electrical Engineering from Clarkson University.