The owners and employees of the Illinois startup company Waste Not Want Not LLC spent time during the latter part of 2025 stocking food pantry shelves, passing out turkey dinners, blending and packaging nutrient-rich dry meals, and decorating a food donation Christmas tree, all within a few miles of their Palatine-based headquarters. They saw the need, wanted to help, and will likely continue doing so in the months and years to come.
They are not a nonprofit organization. Far from it. Waste Not Want Not Want Not is a technology company. In June of 2025, they launched their WNWN (pronounced “win-win”) digital marketplace, where restaurants, bakeries, and other food shops post deals on their unsold goods for pickup at specific times of day. This digital platform is currently available for businesses and customers in the greater Chicagoland area
So why all the good deeds?
“That’s a question we love answering,” says company Co-Founder and CEO Chris Bidle. “It’s an inherent part of who we are and what we do. Waste Not Want Not is headed by a group of longtime service industry professionals, and that’s no accident. We created an app and developed the platform behind it, but we use it to provide a beneficial service. See, we’re still in the service business, same as always.”
Director of Operations Brian Puotinen explains the emphasis on community. “The digital marketplace we’ve developed is location-based and the people who use it are highly attuned to that concept. Our customers have a pretty clear idea of how far they’re willing to go to pick up a WNWN deal. Likewise, our sellers have a good sense of where the majority of their customers are coming from. Business relationships develop in the overlap and a sense of community forms in the process. We strive to be active in our own community because we understand that our business model is rooted in the concept of community.”
Co-Founder and COO Michael Healy completes the puzzle with his own part of the story. “We never want to forget that the whole idea for starting Waste Not Want Not came about during my quest to complete a hundred acts of kindness in honor of my mother, who had passed away a few years ago. It was then that I started buying up unsold food and giving it away. One thing led to another and we started building this marketplace platform.”
We could say the rest is history, except in this case, it hasn’t all been written yet. Meanwhile, the people of Waste Not Want Not continue to do things in and for the community, because that’s who they are and it’s what they do.
