“You read these stats about how 48 million Americans or 50 million Americans live in food-insecure households. That’s the reported number!” said Rao, CEO and co-founder of Sharebite, a New York–based employee meal-benefits platform. He argues the real figure is roughly three times higher.

“So you’re talking about close to 150 million people. Nearly half the country’s population is struggling; they’re living from paycheck-to-paycheck, and they don’t know where their next meals are coming from,” he said.

That number is Rao’s estimate. The official baseline is 47.9 million people who experienced food insecurity in 2024, according to Feeding America’s analysis of federal data. It may be the last reliable count for some time, because the USDA has stopped collecting the household survey behind it.

The pressure behind those numbers is showing up at work. Annual inflation reached 3.7% in September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and food prices are up 33% since 2019, per an Associated Press analysis of federal data cited by NPR. A Government Accountability Office report found that Uber, Lyft and DoorDash now lead major employers in workers receiving SNAP benefits, ahead of Walmart and McDonald’s.

Rao’s pitch is that companies can close part of that gap through something many already pay for: lunch. “We just have to start thinking about hunger, not only as a societal problem but more as an economic problem that businesses can help solve,” he said.

How Sharebite turns office lunch into donations

Founded in 2016, Sharebite is built for businesses, not consumers. Companies use it to manage employee food ordering, meal allowances, and catering for in-office, remote, and hybrid teams, setting stipends and spending limits from one dashboard instead of processing expense reports.

For every meal ordered on the platform, Sharebite donates an equivalent meal through nonprofit partners including Feeding America and City Harvest. The company says it has donated more than 22.4 million meals to date.

Its investors include Prosus, Contour Venture Partners, Essential Capital, Lafayette Square, Liberty City Ventures, and Fiserv, the payments company on the 2026 Fortune 500. Sharebite raised a $39 million Series B round in 2022.

Rao, a former Credit Suisse investment banker, says the idea came from watching how other countries tackle food insecurity by “mobilizing private sectors to step in and help solve it.” He felt it was “high time for us to be able to implement something like that.”

He describes the company as his form of civic service, arguing that serving society, building a successful business, and drawing on the private sector are “all interwoven together.”

Why Rao points to Brazil

Rao’s favorite model is Brazil’s Workers’ Food Program, created in 1976. Companies that join receive tax incentives for feeding their employees, and the program now reaches about 22 million workers, according to Brazil’s Ministry of Labor and Employment.

“Meal benefits or meal vouchers are a standard practice in Brazil as a result,” Rao said.

He argues the U.S. should add food to the employer benefits framework that already covers health care and retirement, a change he says would support workers and stimulate small-business activity. Rao, who has written commentary for Fortune, made a similar case in a 2023 essay on hunger among American workers and again in a 2025 piece written as the record government shutdown ended.

The productivity case for feeding workers

The business argument rests partly on cost. Healthcare spending and lost productivity tied to poor diets and food insecurity exceed $1.1 trillion a year, according to a fact sheet from the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.

Lunch has also become a lever in the return-to-office. Workers surveyed by Owl Labs said they would come back if employers covered commuting, childcare, and lunch and coffee, Fortune reported in 2023.

Rao says Sharebite’s job is aligning “a real business need with a much broader problem,” and credits his team with developing “solutions to solve those problems at that scale” as it works with larger customers.

Record months on a small team

Rao says demand is accelerating. “Last week was our best week ever in the company’s history. October was a record month for us. And it’s the same people who’ve been here for the last few years. Our headcount is small, but our business continues to grow,” he said.

He added that the business is more than 30 times larger than it was four-plus years ago.

After roughly a decade “building inside this category,” Rao doesn’t think the market has matured. In his view, it is “still at the early beginnings of this entire category.”