A West Concord-based food waste tech company is gearing up for a major expansion.
Divert Inc. has secured a $1 billion infrastructure development deal with Enbridge Inc. Divert also announced $80 million in growth equity from Enbridge and $20 million led by current investor Ara Partners.
Divert uses its IoT platform of hardware, sensors and algorithms to help grocery stores track food waste. The company then collects the food waste and uses it in Divert’s anaerobic digesters. Bacteria inside the digesters consume the carbon dioxide from the food and leave behind methane, which is considered a “renewable natural gas” by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. The company was founded in 2007 and acquired by Ara Partners in 2021. Divert has 251 employees, with 55 in Massachusetts.
Divert’s new partner Enbridge is an energy company with liquids pipelines, natural gas pipelines, gas utilities and storage, and renewable energy businesses.
“This relationship with Enbridge just completely opens up the spigot for us to move into markets, move more aggressively,” said Divert CEO and co-founder Ryan Begin.
Customer acquisition
Divert has contracts with over 6,000 grocery stores across the U.S., Begin said. The company is processing waste at 10 facilities, including facilities owned by Divert and partner companies. Begin said they do not have enough facilities to match the waste produced by their growing customer base, hence the growth plans.
Begin told BostInno that this new equity capital will allow Divert to ramp up customer onboarding in markets across the U.S.
“Once we’re in those markets and we’ve grown and we’ve positioned ourselves, we’ll have access to a billion dollars to then build the infrastructure required to then process that wasted food,” Begin said.
In the next eight or so years, Begin says they plan to have 30 anaerobic-digester facilities. That expansion will allow Divert to have a facility within 100 miles of 80% of the U.S. population, he said, which is also where food waste is concentrated.
The chief executive said they’ve been engaging with Enbridge for about a year, but didn’t initially connect to discuss a partnership. Begin said Divert was working on a project in the mid-Atlantic region and reached out to Enbridge.
“We had put calls into their office on just, sort of, the interconnection, which brought us into this energy transition team within Enbridge,” Begin said.
This partnership brings potential benefits to Enbridge as well, Begin said. The byproduct of anaerobic digestion from processing food waste is biogas, Begin explained, which can be cleaned and put into a natural gas pipeline.
“That’s where Enbridge comes in and they say, this is perfect. We have pipelines. This is our business. We’d love to participate. We’re supportive of the energy transition,” Enbridge said.
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