What is the name of your organization?
Food Rescue Hero
What is the name of your solution?
Food Rescue Hero
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Fighting food waste, food insecurity and climate change through technology-coordinated, community-powered networks.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Pittsburgh, PA
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
United States
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
—
What specific problem are you solving?
Globally, about a third of the food we produce for human consumption is thrown away, while one in four people are moderately or severely food-insecure. In the U.S., as much as 40% of our food goes to waste while one in ten people is food-insecure.
Much of the waste occurs at grocery stores, restaurants, and other consumer-facing businesses, where every year 23 million tons of food goes unsold, and largely un-donated – most of it ends up in landfills, where it becomes a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.
Retail food donation presents a number of logistical challenges: pick-up locations are dispersed; amounts and types of food are variable and unpredictable; most surplus food is fresh and highly perishable. The spoke-and-hub model of our decades-old emergency food system misses too much, especially of the most nutritious foods. Though an important element of hunger relief, it is not designed to address food waste; in fact, the EPA’s Excess Food Opportunities Map identifies food banks as excess food generators.
The traditional model also fails to reach many of the people who need food assistance, due to additional access barriers, such as lack of mobility, transportation and time.
What is your solution?
Food Rescue Hero enables organizations and institutions to effectively launch and scale food recovery from a dispersed network of donor businesses to a dispersed network of community access points, by using a ridesharing-style platform to mobilize volunteer drivers. These drivers act as a sort of “Doordash for good,” providing rapid, on-demand transport of surplus food to locations and households that can use it right away.
Since its launch in 2016, the Food Rescue Hero Network has recruited 24 partner organizations in the US and Canada and a growing community of 59K volunteer drivers, who have collectively recovered over 190 million pounds of perfectly good food (the equivalent of more than 160 million meals) and mitigated over 430 million pounds of CO2 emissions.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Communities Building Food Security
We serve people experiencing food-insecurity in our partner communities, using nontraditional distribution sites to get food closer to recipients. In our pilot city of Pittsburgh, we have created a distribution network that delivers nutritious food within a 15-minute walk of 182,886 people living in poverty. After just one year of regular deliveries to public housing sites, we effectively ended emergency food calls to the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh.
We also impact nutrition security: Only about 15% of national food donations include fresh foods, but our rapid-response model enables the recovery of a greater variety of items, made up of 80-90% fresh food and 40% fruits and vegetables. A University of Pittsburgh study found that 86% of the individuals who received deliveries from us locally reported that they ate healthier food as a result.
Communities Building Climate Resilience
By reducing food waste and mitigating its climate impact, we also serve the global community. Since its launch, our network has mitigated over 430 million pounds of CO2 emissions. By driving partner growth and expansion, we’re on course to measurably support UN Sustainable Development Goals 2, 12 and 13 by 2030.
