Compost Crew wants your old food scraps.
The Rockville company has cooked up a plan to expand its food waste recycling service in Greater Washington — starting with $5.5 million in new funding.
The goal, said CEO Ben Parry, is “to take composting from a niche market to a mainstream service.”
Compost Crew routinely collects food waste from D.C.-area businesses, homes and apartment buildings, then recycles those remains into compost — a process that involves allowing those materials to naturally decompose and enrich soil. It plans to use the fresh financing to grow its customer base and build awareness about food waste recycling, Parry said.
The company currently counts 7,000 clients, including municipalities and counties; individual homes, multifamily buildings and homeowners associations; and grocery stores, commercial kitchens, restaurants “and nearly any business that generates food waste,” Parry said. He wants to reach about 10,000 customers by year’s end.
Compost Crew will look to partner with communities and farms to create new recycling programs in Greater Washington. This work will build on Compost Outposts, a turnkey composting system it developed in 2020.
New York sustainable infrastructure fund Lattice Impact Capital led the round. Other investors included D.C.’s K-Street Capital; Rockville real estate firm Tower Cos., a longtime Compost Crew customer; and multiple local executives and other customers, according to the company.
The capital comes as demand rises for Compost Crew’s work. The business, which is profitable, has been growing 40% to 50% per year, “and this raise will enable us to maintain and hopefully accelerate that growth rate,” Parry said, declining to disclose specific revenue figures. “We need to make composting as convenient and affordable as possible to expand our reach, and we need to make sure the local infrastructure is capable of recycling all the food waste generated in the region.”
Compost Crew, which has 40 employees, is now hiring for about a dozen positions in composting, sales and collections. The company has offices in D.C. and Upper Marlboro, in addition to its Rockville headquarters.
For now, it plans to concentrate on its local markets: the District, Northern Virginia and suburban Maryland, including Baltimore, Parry said. But he’s also not discounting the possibility of a broader expansion down the road. “Food waste is a global problem, so there is plenty of work to do,” he said.
Compost Crew was founded in 2011. Parry acquired the company in 2018 and invested some of his own money, before raising a small seed round in 2021 of an undisclosed amount.
The renewable energy sector veteran had previously worked with multiple companies in the space, including Arlington’s Silver Ridge Power; Azure Power and SunEdison, both based in India; and Bethesda’s TerraForm Global, which sold to Toronto’s Brookfield Renewable.
