If you’ve ever watched the television food competition series Chopped on the Food Network, then seeing contestants working to create dishes using an entire basket of totally random items that you would never think to use together isn’t anything new. But for one nonprofit called 412 Food Rescue, they actually do this on an everyday basis, except they take around 1000 pounds of discarded food to make meals for people in need.
412 Food Rescue, which is located in Pittsburgh, is a nonprofit that has managed to connect with tons of local businesses after they discovered how many pounds of still usable surplus food they donate each and every day. By using their very own app, the company has put up the biggest ‘volunteer-led food transport network’ within one city area.
The only problem was that they didn’t have a kitchen big enough to accommodate all the food donations and gifts that were coming into from a number of different avenues, which they had to make into single-serving meals. But thankfully in 2019, they managed to come with the perfect solution to their woes by opening up their very own kitchen which they aptly named, The Good Food Project. Having to not pay for any food, while making zero waste as well, this kitchen is an incredible model when it comes to be best and most effective form of food distribution and food recovery.
Most people are not aware that around 25% of all material in landfills are actually made from food waste, more than any other source of a single type of waste. And it when it rots, it becomes the leading cause of greenhouse gas emissions as well.
What makes The Good Food Project successful is that it manages to use the so-called “food waste” that would normally go into landfills by transforming it into ‘healthy, heat-and-eat meals and shelf-stable items’ that even happen to be packed into compostable containers, adding to sustainability and doing their part to go even greener for the planet. Moreover, these meals are also distributed to nonprofit organizations to help provide food to the needy.
Such food donations tend to come from some food partners like Gordon Food Service. Although their food donations are still considered 100% okay to eat, they can no longer be sold due to the company’s professional aesthetic standards, their transit mishaps, and the lapsed sell-by timelines.
The Person Behind 412 Food Rescue
As for the person behind 412FoodRescue.org, Leah Lizarondo, she began the organization back in 2015 precisely to find ways to redirect food from becoming useless waste into nonprofit companies, shelters, and households. In order to make this happen, she created an app that allows volunteers to pick up from certain locations and deliver to the necessary destinations, making it easy for them to bring surplus food to those that need it.
FoodRescueHero app currently has a team of 25,000 volunteer drivers, a number that is still growing, in at least 15 cities at that. Along with 800 food retailer partners, the group has managed to turn over 70 million pounds of surplus into at almost 57 million meals. At the same time, this means that they’ve saved the atmosphere from what would have been an additional 30 million pounds of CO2 because of waste.
And because their kitchen is located in Millvale, which sits on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, it has managed to create over 17,000 meals for people. This accounts for 600 or more meals per week, all at zero food cost.
Even more incredible, the kitchen uses solar-power to even help offset any energy use, it has also been finding more ways to expand their reach while making sure that they’ve reduced all their waste to zero. Aside from the company using every single ounce of food that it can, whatever food is leftover is composted as well.
For Leah, her kitchen project is a testimony of solving three separate global issues that include food waste, food insecurity, and climate crisis. To learn more about Leah and her mission, watch the video below.
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