His Plan: Vote Twice — Then Eat Right

Greg Grinberg has a solution for people fed up with the two presidential candidates: They can vote twice, legally, and choose a better candidate without helping to elect the lesser of two evils.

In the final week of the presidential campaign, Grinberg and fellow hackers have produced a website where people can choose from among not two, but 16, presidential candidates.

The results will be tallied on the basis of ​“ranked voting”: You list your preferences for each candidate, in order. That way your preferred candidate gets the most votes. But you also get to have a vote count for a top-ranking candidate above the other — Hillary Clinton, say, or Donald Trump.

It’s not a ​“real” election. (Obviously you cast your second ballot, the real one, this coming Tuesday.) But hundreds have started taking part in Grinberg’s experiment, to see how ranked voting works. The goal is to use the experiment to promote the concept of ranked voting beyond the election, team up with election reformers, and try to change America’s electoral system so that voters don’t end up always feeling like they have to vote for someone they despise less than someone else.

Grinberg, a 32-year-old software engineer and ​“social entrepreneur” who lives in Wooster Square, has been quietly trying to change the world since moving to New Haven six years ago. The ranked voting project is a sideline to his day (and night) gig: Creating a new online ordering platform to enable people to buy healthful fairly-traded food without paying more. In short, revolutionizing America’s grocery business. He calls his company ​“Actual Food.” He and seven employees are developing the platform with the help of about $100,000 a year in philanthropic money.

I’ll tell you a lot more about that later in this article. But since it’s the final lap of the presidential mania marathon, first a few words about ​“ranked voting.”

The Electoral Revolution

Grinberg spoke about the voting project — ​“a labor of love by software engineers, artists, and social entrepreneurs” created ​“in our spare time in New Haven” — during an episode of WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven.” The need before he had stayed up until 5 a.m. in Miya’s restaurant fine-tuning the project with two friends, chef Bun Lai and spoken-word poet and community organizer Hanifa Washington.

“Ranked voting” is an umbrella term for systems that allow voters to choose from a list of candidates. A physics and math geek who graduated from Bard College, Grinberg has long been interested in the subject — particularly a variety called ​“Condorcet Voting,” named after 18th-Century French mathematician-philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet, who developed it. (Grinberg walks through the mathematical formulas behind the tabulation in the radio interview, which you can click onto at the bottom of this story.)

Grinberg’s interest was renewed as the presidential election neared. He heard many people wishing they didn’t have to face the choice of either voting for a candidate they’d like to see become president — or deciding between Democrat Clinton and Republican Trump in order to prevent the worse choice from winning. ​“So many people,” he observed, ​“are dissatisfied with the two major party candidates.”

He started working on a website to enable people to experienced ranked voting, as a first step toward spreading the word about it. He brought the idea to a hackathon organized earlier this fall by SeeClickFix founder Ben Berkowitz. He found other engineers interested in working on it.

Last week the site went live. Click here to see it, to learn about the process, and to vote. You can see the team’s design chops at work in a video that explains the concept.

“Voting on RankedChoiceVote.com doesn’t replace going to the ballot box on election day,” the site states. ​“But it does help us — the voters —signal to each other our true preferences before the official vote … and together we can prove that we can be voting in a much smarter, much more convenient way.”

In order to give a broad choice, the ballot includes not just official third-party candidates Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein, but 11 other candidates who ran, and dropped out, of the Democratic and Republican primaries. Vice-President Joe Biden is on there too. (A veritable third-party candidate, Evan McMullin, is not.)

You choose however many candidates you would like to see elected, and rank them in order of preference. You pick as many undesired candidates as well, and rank those, too.

“You’re finally being asked the question: What do you really want?” Grinberg said.

If such a system were in place in the 1992 presidential election, for instance, third-party candidate Ross Perot might have been elected, if it turned out that most George Bush I voters had him as a top choice and felt they could vote for both candidates. Or Bush might have won if most Perot voters listed him as their second choice.

So far the candidate with the most votes in this week’s RankedChoiceVote election has been — ​“surprise” — Bernie Sanders, reflecting the initial pool of people drawn to the project.

But the larger purpose is not to promote a candidate but to promote the concept of shared voting. Grinberg would like to see it used not just in presidential, but in other federal, state and local campaigns.

“We can use it to bypass the noise of early polls,” he said. ​“As a voter I would like to know what the voters actually think about the candidates” and the issues.

Before he changes the American electoral system, though, Grinberg is trying to take down Big Food.

The Grocery Revolution

That’s the mission of his day job, running the business Actual Food.

More precisely, the mission is to build an alternative to shopping in stores commandeered by processed-food companies to steer you to load up on junk.

After college, Grinberg worked for years as a software engineer. He saved up enough money, he said, to be able to spend years developing Actual Food. He has been living off those savings for the past six years as he and a team of seven others develop the business.

He established Actual Food as a ​“social enterprise” — a for-profit corporation with a social purpose, trying to solve a problem through the market. So far, the funding has come from philanthropic sources. The company operates on about $100,00 a year, he said. Most of the employees work completely, or in part, for shares of stock.

The ultimate goal is to have customers sign up to order food online for free same-day home delivery, and along the way make informed choices about their health and the way the food is grown. Grinberg envisions teaming up with local farmers markets in the endeavor. Over the next 12 months he hopes to roll out a trial in New Haven.

The following is an edited excerpt of the conversation about Actual Food on WNHH radio’s ​“Dateline New Haven”:

You told me you came to New Haven by choice — not because you had someone you were in love with or something — because you were looking for a city to do the kind of work you want to do. And you compared it to Boston and New York — that’s very interesting to me. What is it about New Haven again … because people had heard of social entrepreneurs?

There were so many reasons that made New Haven a great choice for me personally, but also a great place to start a company like Actual Food. When I first got here, when I would talk about social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, what I found is that people here in New Haven almost entirely knew what I was talking about already.

But you made the choice to come.

It was sort of a wet concrete choice. I was exploring New York, I was exploring Boston, I was exploring accelerator programs for Actual Food. What I kind of found is that, you know, it takes a village to create something new, and New Haven is that village. There’s an incredible talent pool, and, I mean, the density of people doing things that are transformative here as labors of love, as their day jobs …

Everyone’s a walking 501c3, right?

Indeed.

I think the density of motivated, intelligent people who are passionate, who are working all hours of the day and night to create something new, the density of people like that here is very, very high … When I was thinking about a company like Actual Food, I was thinking: ​“where is a natural home for it?” The ethos of social entrepreneurship here in New Haven made a huge difference for me.

So let me go back to the beginning. When did you start this company, Actual Food?

Six years ago.

And where did you get the money for it? Is it a for profit? 

It is a for-profit that is philanthropically funded, which is really kind of interesting, because …

Our tagline is that we build the technology to make healthy, sustainable eating, healthy for everyone.

The three bullet points are access, people being able to physically access heathy food within convenient distance of where you live and where you work; affordability, of course; and awareness.

That’s probably the most important of the three: the effect on your buying choices when you walk into the supermarket and you see walls of Coca-Cola right when you walk in.

Of course that’s not accidental. There’s a financial relationship between the supermarket and the product manufacturer that has many supermarkets now making more money on a net basis from what is essentially advertising, what amounts to a very kind of insidious form of advertising, um, than they do from selling food.

Think about that for a second. That’s a remarkable statement, that when you walk into the supermarket, you are not the most important customer. The most important customer for the bottom line is, in many cases, the processed food manufacturers. And the reason for that is that placing products around the store in different configurations has a tremendous effect on what we as consumers choose to buy.

So when you look at the epidemic of chronic diseases over the last 30 years, which is really an epidemic of processed food causing those kinds of diseases in many cases …

Like diabetes?

Exactly. The four major chronic diseases being diabetes, heart disease, stroke and cancer. You know, heart disease, coronary artery disease, vascular disease. And what you find is that the industry has gotten really good at kind of hacking the software that kind of runs inside of our brains as decision-making animals, and they’ve kind of figured out a way to influence us to buy more and more processed food.

So at Actual Food, what we want to do is use the same techniques. We want to learn from what industry has done. We want to learn from what academia has learned about so-called ​“choice architecture.” We want to apply that to build an alternative buying environment. An online buying environment in which as you choose your food, you’re receiving coaching toward a healthier diet, toward foods that are healthier for you specifically.

So it’s personalized preventative medicine through food, and it’s using the techniques of behavioral psychology to nudge you to make healthier decisions as you shop.

Right now, what we are is a design lab. If you know ​“Ideo” in Silicon Valley, we’re sort of that, but directed exclusively toward solving this problem of: how do we make food as preventative medicine the new normal for the mainstream customer? How do we reinvent grocery retail to do that?

So do you have customers yet who are buying food on your platform?

No, we don’t. So what we’ve spent the last six years doing is building technology in order to make good on this promise of online grocery shopping that works or everybody, whether you live in a food desert of whether you live in East Rock.

The future that we see is rolling out this platform in New Haven as a living lab, as an experiment. Because the truth is that no one has really cracked the nut of online grocery shopping yet; 99 percent of us are still going to the supermarket, and that’s true when we were buying everything else online.

We expect to roll it out within the next 12 months here, but in a very soft launch kind of way. The challenge with online grocery shopping is that no one has really gotten it right yet. I mean, you look at these multi-billion dollar failures like Webvan and Groceryworks, and you realize that people have very high expectations of their food retailer. The fact that food is perishable, you’re buying 40 or 50 things every time you go to the store … These present unique challenges, challenges that have not been solved in e‑commerce to date.

So there’s a lot of work to do. We’re excited to be doing it right here in New Haven.

This does sound really exciting! So walk me through — when this rolls out. Let’s say I’m Jill Shopper — I sign up to be a customer through actualfood.com. What does that mean? Do I pay you a fee?

What we’re targeting is price parity with the supermarket without any delivery fees or membership fees of any kind. Affordability to us is key. It is one of the three pillars of health.

So how does Jill buy her groceries through you?

You order online. From the customer standpoint, it is hopefully pretty simple. You order online, and your food is delivered either to your place of work or to your home, or some place near those two.

So you’re not going to walk into the store and see all those Coca-Cola bottles and losing your consciousness and drifting off into a sugar coma before you walk out the door. You’re going online and you’re browsing the aisles through your actual food? Now this is a little bit like … the Stop & Shop delivery (Peapod)?

It is similar in that you are using an online ordering platform. It’s very different in terms of the overall experience; it’s very different in terms of what you’re being nudged to buy. In our view, the online ordering platform shouldn’t be just a buying tool; it should be a coaching tool. It should be helping you make better decisions for you and your family. 

So I know when I sign up for you, I’m doing this with the conscious choice that I want to eat better, and I want to make better choices. So I’m going to sign up for Actual Food to do my online shopping because they’re going to help me find better choices. Can I still find junk if I want it?

You can, and I think that that’s really important. We’re not absolutists when it comes to food. I’m certainly not personally — I very much enjoy those cupcakes at Edge of the Woods …

The vegan ones?

Oh yeah.

I just had those, my sister brought them over Sunday night. They were quite good. 

Vegan rocky road cupcake is, you know, my downfall.

Okay. So is the idea that I do online shopping with Actual Food [and] you coach me and steer me there and not get sidetracked by product placement and processed food companies displays in stores?

Right. If you want to use food as medicine, if you want to …

Why should we use food as medicine? Isn’t there also a love of food, an enjoyment, your rocky road cupcake —or even when you’re eating well and you feel good, you also want to have a taste, right? You wanna have a seitan pepper steak; you don’t want to just have protein powder …

Oh yeah, absolutely. And my friend Bun Lai at Miya’s and I kind of talk about this constantly: Food is one of these things where it has to be a kind of ​“all of the above” experience. It should be healthy, it should be sustainable, it should be really enjoyable, it should be something really enjoyable, that brings people together …

But if you’re saying ​“medicine,” are you gonna get a wide customer base? Most people don’t want to think of food as medicine. They want to think of medicine as medicine.

Right now, I’m here at the New Haven Independent radio station; I mean, I’m talking to a community of change-makers here. And I’m talking about what we’re out to do fundamentally. And …

It’s just something that I think about too. Because like, my wife and I, we make our daily smoothies, I’m often thinking, like — she likes to load ​‘em up with the chia seeds, and I like to put in the protein powder because I’m vegan and [they have] B12 and protein, but then I’m thinking: I want to make sure it tastes delicious still. I want to make sure I’m putting enough frozen strawberries and banana and orange juice, that this is fun to eat, and I’m looking forward to it. If food becomes a chore … I’ve been very discouraged by the people who are creating the new soylent green and the products where it’s just medicine. What is life about if you’re doing it to be purely animalistic, just to live to the next day and have less of a chance of a heart attack, rather than also savoring the experience of living?

I couldn’t agree more! In fact, I don’t see how those two things can be separated. And certainly, our view of the future of food is not dinner in a bottle.

Certainly we’re not going to the consumer with the pitch of: Use food as medicine and that’s it. For us, when we go to the consumer, we’re talking about convenience, we’re talking about much better food in a much smarter way, we’re talking about much fresher food, we’re talking about a much wider variety of locally grown foods as well as the foods that you can find at a supermarket, and we’re talking about a way of doing it that doesn’t cost you anymore, and that saves you time.

What consumers want from their food buying experience is convenience, price and selection. And those are the things that we’re talking about when we talk to the consumer.

I’m talking to fellow dreamers and change-makers who want to see a different food system, and so the long-term vision is very much about if we can get the mainstream customer shopping differently for their food. Can we be a lever of much deeper change in the food system beyond just shifting from … going from 100 percent brick and mortar to at least partially online?

So, if I become a customer with you, I will not pay any more for my food — your goal is to be … it would cost me the same if I went to the store? Is that because you’ll do enough volume so that you’ll negotiate with the stores to cut them enough of a discount so that they can eat the cost of delivering it?

Well, yeah. I think that the status quo of food business, of food retail and food distribution, is incredibly interesting. It turns out that you don’t really need that much volume to buy from a distributer in the first place.

Would you be going to both Stop & Shop and Edge Of The Woods and Elm City Market? Like, would I, as a customer, buy this food from Stop & Shop, this food from Elm City Market, or would you be going just to the natural food places?

Where we would like to move the conversation to, is: Where did your food actually come from? And so the word ​“actual” in Actual Food starts to take on a whole variety, a whole many layers of meanings …

Beginning with fair trade coffee from Latin America, or ..

Exactly. This kale came from what farm locally? You know, is it organic, is it IPM?

It stands for integrated pest management, so it’s a sort of choose your own adventure between conventional and organic. What we think is important is not: did this food spend some time on the shelves of Stop & Shop or did it spend some time on the shelves of an Elm City Market? What’s important is who grew it, how did they grow it, were the people who grew it treated fairly.

Who will your distributors be? Will you go straight to the food distributors or then hire someone to deliver that food, or will Stop & Shop be delivering that food with their Peapod service. Will Edge Of The Woods start a service?

There are going to be many answers to that over time, as we build out the service. To start with, we will work with local retailers. We will also over time work with distributors. But from day one it’s very important to us to work with local farms directly — so sourcing directly from local farms. We’ve been pretty fortunate to work with some pretty visionary local farmers who see Actual Food as an online virtual farmer’s market that’s open 24/7 where they can communicate with the customer in virtual media …

Will I get all my groceries? Will I also get Drano? Or will you get me something that’s better than Drano?

Yeah. I mean, if we’re not getting you out of the supermarket, than what are we doing?

And what about the physical act of shopping? Is there something that’s going to be lost if I don’t get to go look over the produce myself, or see things I didn’t think of buying? I guess I could still browse on your platform. 

Yeah! And I don’t see Actual Food eliminating retailers. I don’t see any online grocery eliminating brick and mortar retailers. I don’t think that’s where we are. I think where we are is that brick and mortar is where 99 percent of us are getting our food. Some people want to shift to buying it online.

Lucy Gellman contributed to this story.