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Explore the full 2023 list of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies, 540 organizations that are reshaping industries and culture. We’ve selected the firms making the biggest impact across 54 categories, including agriculture, corporate social responsibility, energy, and more.
The past year saw the striking down of women’s reproductive rights, a hostile push against ESG initiatives, and increased attention to the climate crisis and racial justice. With that backdrop, these companies strived to create purpose—and put that effort at the center of their business models.
Inflation and rising grocery prices have led to massive food insecurity, yet tons of food are going to waste. To combat those problems, Flashfood and Copia have their own unique models to divert food waste from landfills to hungry people.
Other companies are working to lower emissions and increase sustainability, whether by building with a wood alternative to relieve tropical forests, like Modern Mill; or perfecting the robotic recycling process, like EverestLabs. And Lithos Carbon is using natural volcanic rock to capture carbon on farms.
Some are using their business to lift up marginalized communities, by providing car share services in transport deserts, like Via; or offering tech education and employment for minority groups long shut out of opportunities, like Bitwise. And Stix launched emergency contraception in the lead-up to one of the most momentous decisions in recent history, the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
1. FLASHFOOD
For ensuring SNAP recipients stay nourished, while diverting food waste
Retail operations play a large part in global food waste; a single grocery store throws out $5,000 to $10,000 worth of food every day. Flashfood’s mission is to divert that food from landfills and onto hungry people’s plates. The startup’s app lets stores list soon-to-expire food at a discount, and has sold 50 million pounds of food through September 2022, resulting in $120 million in savings, at a time when food prices have been rising. Flashfood has grown 300% in the last year and now boasts 2.5 million users.
It’s already available to use in 1,600 grocery stores around the U.S., and in 2022 Flashfood began allowing electronic benefits transfers for SNAP recipients as a payment option, making the company’s cheaper food available to the 13% of Americans who receive those benefits. It started that program with a two-week pilot, in partnership with supermarket chain Meijer, in an area of Michigan with high food insecurity. When the pilot ended, Flashfood rolled out the SNAP payment option to all 259 Meijer supercenters in the Midwest. In 2023, the program will expand to Flashfood’s other U.S. grocery partners, which include Giant, Stop & Shop, and Tops Friendly Markets.
Read more about Flashfood, honored as No. 36 on Fast Company’s list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023.
2. EVERESTLABS
For refining the clunky process of recovering recyclables
Sorting recyclables can be inefficient, expensive, and even dangerous. Human pickers often sort objects incorrectly, resulting in them being sent to landfill, and risk being injured by sharp objects among the bottles and cans. Existing robotic solutions aren’t much more efficient. EverestLabs‘ RecycleOS is a recyclables recovery system that uses AI, cameras, and robotics to address these problems.
The company rolled out a working system in 2022, proving it can cleverly sort similar-looking trash (not all shiny metal is aluminum, for instance), and identify contaminating, unrecyclable objects. The machine is smaller and less clunky than traditional recycle robots, and has a higher pick rate, correctly grabbing nearly 90% of objects. Everest claims that it has so far avoided landfill for 667 tons of items thanks to its operations, saved 1,839 tons of CO2 emissions, and that 25% to 40% more waste is being recycled in its operations that use RecycleOS. In December 2022, the largest commingled recycling facility in the country, in Brooklyn, installed Everest’s RecycleOS.
3. VIA
For increasing transport options for the underserved and people who don’t own cars
Via partners with city transit agencies to shape their legacy systems into modern, digital networks, using the company’s transportation planning software. The goal is to help build equitable transportation systems that better support underserved communities and negate the need for private cars. Via and its TransitTech has proven especially helpful as post-pandemic work schedules and wildly fluctuating gas prices are changing transport habits. In December 2022, for example, Via added Remix Scheduling to its TransitTech software, allowing municipal transportation leaders to adjust its driver needs easily to adapt to the fluid nature of travel patterns.
Ridership in Via’s networks increased 67% in 2022 over the year prior, through such efforts as Birmingham, Alabama, expanding microtransit options to 19 transportation-deprived neighborhoods in November. Via’s on-demand shuttle service matches multiple travelers headed in the same direction into the same car, so it can offer the service for a cost comparable to a bus trip. In Jersey City, New Jersey, Via now serves more than 50,000 riders a month, improving the ability for low-to-moderate income residents to commute further to 47% more of the city’s jobs. In April 2022, Via helped fill transportation gaps in inner-city Richmond, California, introducing an electric vehicle fleet so riders could get around and connect to other public transit such as the BART light rail, Amtrak, and the boat ferry service that connects Richmond to San Francisco.
4. CLARITY AI
For providing investors with data insights to inform their impact strategies
Today’s ethics-minded investors increasingly have to navigate new and evolving regulations around sustainability, avoid funding companies engaging in greenwashing, and align their portfolio with their values. Tech platform Clarity AI harnesses machine learning to quantify data about corporate operations to provide real-time data insights for investors. The software is designed to ensure compliance with quickly-evolving regulations created to bring clarity to the ESG investing sector, including new mandatory disclosures in the EU and the U.K.
Clarity AI’s clients now have more than $30 trillion in assets under management, and it currently analyzes 70,000 companies and 360,000 funds in 198 countries. It also integrates into investment management portfolios, working with global firms including BlackRock and Santander.
5. STIX
For improving access to birth control at a perilous time for women’s reproductive rights
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Stix is a vaginal and reproductive health brand that sells and delivers at-home tests for pregnancy, UTIs, and ovulation, as well as medications including the morning-after pill. The objective is discretion: It started after the cofounder bumped into her boyfriend’s mother at the pharmacy when picking up a pregnancy test, highlighting the embarrassment of in-person collection of personal products.
In anticipation of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Stix launched an emergency contraception kit, dubbed Restart, which it began shipping in June 2022. The company installed billboards advertising the item close to crisis pregnancy centers, which typically do not advise patients of all their choices, in trigger states including Kentucky and Utah. On June 27, three days after the official Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs case was announced, the company was processing 10 times the orders than it had days earlier, and reported a 600% surge in demand for its emergency contraceptive, selling more than 17,000 doses to date. The company has built up a customer base in excess of 200,000 people and claims that it sells a Stix product every 20 minutes.
6. LITHOS CARBON
For increasing crop yields and capturing carbon with “rock dust”
Basalt is a volcanic rock, and one of the most abundant minerals on earth. It also has two features that could prove highly beneficial to a post-climate-change world: It can help improve the health of depleted agricultural soil, and it also sequesters carbon from the atmosphere. Carbon capture company Lithos Carbon, which launched in March 2022, combines these two features by paying farmers to apply a dust made of ground-up basalt (which it sources from mining operations where it’s considered a waste product) to their fields. When rainwater mixes with carbon in the air and the rock dust on the ground, it creates a material called dissolved bicarbonate that both improves the soil quality and locks in CO2. It eventually transfers to rivers and streams, then to the ocean, where it’s used by marine animals to build their shells. Once the animals die, they fall to the ocean floor, keeping the carbon locked underwater.
The company uses the carbon it sequesters on its partner farms to sell credits: Lithos is one of the largest suppliers of credits to Frontier, a carbon market led by Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, Meta, and McKinsey. In its first year, the company deployed more than 11,000 tons of rock on more than 1,000 acres of farms to capture 2,000 tons of carbon, roughly the equivalent to the total output of 400 cars. By the end of 2023, the company is aiming to add 5,000 new acres of farms and to have removed 10,000 tons of CO2. Lithos’s machine-learning software tracks the minerals from field to ocean, assessing both carbon capture and crop yields—which have increased by up to 47% on the farms it works with—to help farmers maximize revenue and to increase the accuracy of its credits.
7. COPIA
For bridging the gap between food waste and food insecurity
Even though 13.8 million Americans suffer from food insecurity, 40% of produced food is wasted. There’s plenty of food to feed everyone, but the surplus is not ending up in the right hands. The app allows restaurants, hotels, and corporate cafeterias to list food they have available, and then Copia‘s algorithm matches it with interested local nonprofits (the customer can then opt to deliver the donation themselves, or Copia can dispatch a third-party driver).
The company’s subscription model is now used in more than 400 locations in all 50 states by such large chain brands as The Cheesecake Factory, 1Hotels, and Visa, as well as independent eateries. In 2022, to better quantify the impact of its marketplace, the company launched a portal to help its users calculate both environmental impact and tax deductions; Copia claims to help its partners achieve anywhere from $10,000 to $3 million in tax savings. Also last year, Copia surpassed 5 million pounds of surplus food donated, reportedly saving 23 million pounds of carbon, all while tripling its revenue over 2021.
8. MAYOR’S FUND FOR LOS ANGELES
For providing a rich pot of cash for progressive public programs
The Mayor’s Fund is a novel nonprofit that facilitates private-public partnerships, raising funds from a mix of private and philanthropic sources, and disbursing those funds to help pay for some of L.A.’s most ambitious public assistance programs. In one, the city placed millions of dollars in emergency pandemic relief funds on preloaded debit cards and ultimately disbursed $36 million in cash assistance during the pandemic. In 2022, the so-called “Angeleno Cards,” as they’ve been dubbed, have formed the template for a replicable model for further relief distribution—for residents whose homes were destroyed by a fireworks explosion caused by the LAPD, for example, as well as for homeless people who are transitioning into housing.
The Fund was also behind the launch of one of the country’s biggest guaranteed income pilots, in which 3,200 low-income people are receiving $1,000 a month for a year. In total for 2022, the city has raised $76 million that has been paid out in programs that have supported more than 225,000 Angelenos.
9. MODERN MILL
For producing a stylish tropical wood alternative to help save forests
Wood is technically a sustainable material, but a complicated one: Trees take a long time to grow back, and producing lumber contributes to deforestation and the resulting loss of biodiversity and fertile land for local communities. But wood is also a vital building material. Mississippi-based Modern Mill has created a wood alternative called Acre, a biomaterial that’s made from upcycled rice hulls, the hard rice coverings that are removed during processing and are usually trashed. Acre resembles a tropical wood, such as cedar or teak, and is durable and easily substituted in building processes that would normally require wood or a composite made with trees. But it’s zero-waste and 100% wood-free. The company claims that in its first year of operation, it has saved the equivalent of approximately 44,000 acres of tropical rainforest, or 13,000 softwood trees, and diverted more than 4,000 tons of rice hulls from landfills.
In August 2022, the company launched siding products, followed quickly by its October debut of porch flooring made of its material, adding to its existing line of decking and sheet goods. Modern Mill also partnered with companies including Heineken, which is using the new material to construct its Greenbar that debuted at Formula 1 in Miami. The Modern Mill factory, which operates in rural Fernwood, Mississippi, about 100 miles south of Jackson, has created more than 100 jobs in a poverty-stricken area, and also offers employees degree or trade skill opportunities at a local community college.
10. BITWISE INDUSTRIES
For ushering underrepresented people into the tech industry
The tech industry is dominated by the privileged—college-educated people living in large U.S. markets like Silicon Valley. Bitwise Industries has worked since 2013 to increase access to the sector for underrepresented groups—women, LGBTQ, first-generation immigrants, and veterans—via tech training and apprenticeships. In August 2022, Bitwise expanded to overlooked cities, opening hubs in four new locales: Buffalo, El Paso, Texas, Greeley, Colorado, and Las Cruces, New Mexico. It also provides childcare and transportation services to give its students more time to complete their lessons.
In late 2021, Bitwise partnered with the city of Bakersfield, California (and the surrounding county), where it has operated since 2019, to launch its first Ignite Innovation Lab, a tech business incubator for budding entrepreneurs to create their own startups in the city. The first graduates of the program completed the six-month skills program in spring 2022, and the imperative of the lab is for these startup founders to create high-wage job opportunities for other Bitwise graduates. Since Bitwise’s founding in 2013, it has trained `10,000 students in such disciplines as coding, data science, and robotics. Eighty percent of Bitwise alums end up in a tech job, with the average person tripling their annual income from $21,500 to $62,700.
