Amanda Weeks

Post-pitch story

Amanda Weeks pitched Industrial Organic as a Brooklyn operation turning restaurant food scraps into fertilizer, keeping waste out of landfills and cutting greenhouse gas emissions. She came back to the show in a later season, and her company kept evolving. Industrial Organic moved into a commercial facility in Newark, New Jersey, and rebranded as Ambrosia. It raised a $1.3 million seed round led by Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, with SOSV and BBG Ventures joining. In 2020 Ambrosia launched Veles, a household cleaning spray made from water reclaimed from food waste — a clever closed-loop product that got attention well beyond the waste industry. Later that same year, in October 2020, Ambrosia was acquired by Recycle Track Systems (RTS), a New York waste and recycling technology company, as RTS's third acquisition. Weeks joined RTS as a vice president to run her former company's operations and other zero-waste projects, and has continued there in a strategy role. From food scraps in Brooklyn to a successful sale within about five years, Industrial Organic is one of the clearest wins to come out of Season 1 — and proof that a business built on garbage can turn out to be very valuable.