In March 2020 a small group of California college students helped make some Orange County guacamole-lovers very, very happy.

In Costa Mesa, CA Orange County Market Place organizers were in a bind. Due to COVID-19 pandemic government regulation and safety precautions, the outdoor weekend food festival was closed quickly and vendors had 250 pounds of tomatoes, avocados, cilantro, onions, jalapenos, and other produce that could go to waste.

Spectra, the market owner, reached out to Food Recovery Verified, a national college-based program that helps companies redistribute food from conferences and other events.

Food Recovery Verified is an extension of the national nonprofit Food Recovery Network (FRN) made up of 4,000 students at 230 college campuses across the country dedicated to preventing food waste at dining halls and hunger relief in local communities.

The Orange Coast College student FRN team began coordinating the Orange County Market Place food recovery, then worked with a partner organization, Waste Not OC, to complete the effort and redirect the produce to Second Harvest Food Bank. Guacamole was on the menu that day!

FRN Executive Director Regina Anderson says: “This food recovery really demonstrated how a team of collaborators can work together to ensure that food is not wasted and it is going to feed people in the community.” 

At the outset of the pandemic, the FRN teams were able to do food recovery work but once colleges announced closings, food recovery stopped. This was devastating for college students for many reasons, but hit the FRN student teams hard because of their commitment to the community food programs.

In fact college students have been serious about this work since 2011. FRN college students have helped recover 4 million pounds of dining hall food (3.2 million meals) and redistributed it to local food banks, churches, and community centers.

Suddenly in March, they could no longer help feed people.

Anderson says: “These students are committed even when things are hard. They recover food even the day after disasters hit in their communities, like floods and wildfires,” and they wanted to help even as a pandemic swept through the nation.

The Food Recovery Verified program was one path. Several years ago, Anderson developed this program when students realized that they could recover food off campus and in other areas of their lives, like at museums, conferences, and corporate cafeterias.

The students not only help with the work but also promote the community efforts that partner companies make. She says, “We act as a third party verifier and bullhorn of the wider commitment to prevent food waste and help feed people.”

Another way FRN students help outside the campus: farm gleaning. Farmers have contracts to produce food. If those contracts are cancelled, as many were when the pandemic precautions forced education and business activities to close, the fresh food still has to go somewhere. It has to be harvested.

Anderson says: “We have over 400 food agencies that receive our network’s food, and we take the term “network” very seriously. When we heard partner organizations like homeless shelters, say: ‘We need more fresh fruits and vegetables,’ we refocused our efforts to do more gleaning.”

The Food Recovery Network teams are particularly suited for collecting and redistributing fresh food.

Anderson says: “Some people and organizations are squeamish about collecting and redistributing fresh food and produce. Many prefer to work with nonperishables or less perishable food, like uncooked rice. The food safety uncertainty of handling and sharing perishable food worries people, but we work with it every day and have the training and experience to help redirect the food safely.”

Peanut Butter Sandwiches Aren’t Enough: Starting Something Big

This drive to make a difference began in 2011 when four college students at the University of Maryland, College Park, were talking about how they wanted to be active in their community. One was a volunteer making peanut butter sandwiches at a food pantry, but said it felt like that wasn’t doing enough. Two had internships working at the cafeteria and said that the workers were throwing away a lot of food at the end of the night.

They saw a solution to a problem. They asked: “Can’t we give this food to the church down the street?” After initial resistance, the dining director agreed to give it a try.

The co-founders then called friends at other colleges, encouraging them to start programs.  By 2012, Students at Brown University, then the University of California at Pomona started working with their dining managers.

In 2015, Regina Anderson became executive director of this college recovery and redistribution effort that spread slowly by word of mouth and became the Food Recovery Network (FRN). She says: “It was a very grassroots effort.”

FRN has grown organically over the years, but expanded in a big way in 2019 when the nonprofit absorbed a similar collegiate recovery program, called Campus Kitchens, with 60 chapters.

 Why Food Recovery Network Works

Anderson says: “Throwing food away is not what the people who make the food want to do. They worked hard to make it, but they may not know what they can do with it.”

The student volunteers are trained to know where to go in the kitchens, and what can and can’t be donated.

Anderson’s team and the students help educate their dining staff partners, and then handle the food recovery plan and coordination of getting the food to the people who need it.

They work as friends with the cooks and servers and they’re responsible and serious about this work. Anderson says, “If the lunch ends at 2 pm, the students are in the kitchen to do recovery at 1:50 pm.”

Anderson adds: “Sometimes it comes down to a simple act: With just a simple twist, you can make a difference: If you turn to the left it goes in the trash, to the right, it goes into a recyclable container to serve someone.”

The recovery process is simple once it’s up and running. In some cases, they can even go from food recovery to serving the food in 45 minutes.

The students pack up the food in reusable/food safe containers, and take the temperature of the food in every large container to make sure it’s safe. They refrigerate or freeze-pack it, depending on the type of food and where it’s going or when it will be used. Then the students label and weigh it. They drive their own vehicles or bike or walk it to the drop-off location. When they arrive, the students take the food temperature again (of all the trays).

By weighing and cataloging how much food they redistribute, they not only help save food from being discarded and help feed people, but they also help the dining service team understand how much food overage there is.

 Anderson says: “We share our data, trying to create behavior change: To have universities reduce food waste by making better food purchase decisions.”

 “A lot of nonprofits, including us, count and showcase our high recovery rates—our millions of pounds of food recovered. But we not only recognize our chapters that have the highest recovery poundage, but also the lowest [when it signifies a big change]. We celebrate chapters that have reduced their recovery weights because the schools have reduced waste overall. We celebrate that we’re breaking through and achieving one of our main goals—reducing waste.”

Anderson explains that the college food waste story is somewhat complicated.

The problem is not that the staff is egregiously overbuying. She says that colleges never want to get in a situation that there isn’t enough of anything, considering how much is paid for tuition and board. However, by the student teams sharing data, the colleges can make some changes.

There are also a lot of dynamic situations, where a food recovery plan in place can salvage a tremendous amount of good food.

For example, if there is a March Madness college basketball event, organizers might plan to have food for 500 people, but then it rains and only 200 people show up.

Anderson says: “We try to get people to think ahead for what to do with the extra food, and we help them create a simple redistribution process.”

“Hot Line Bling” Connecting Food Activists

 The lifeblood of the FRN comes from the student volunteers—their excitement and commitment to being involved in something important, doing good, and contributing to positive change.

The organization’s hired staff is mostly young professionals just out of college, and Anderson continues to tap into their enthusiasm and understanding of college activities and students’ needs. She has also added more of a foundation to help simplify the students’ efforts.

She says: “We’ve created more resources. We wanted students to be able to talk to each other. Now we have a national conference every two years. We designated regional outreach coordinators and hold a regional summit. Students connect with other local schools and share best practices.

They even created a student-run hotline to connect FRN teams across the country with other chapter activists. They have fun with it, calling it “Hotline Bling” after the Drake song.

A Deeper Dive For Increased Impact

Hunger relief and food waste are not short-term problems. Helping to create systemic change across college campuses and in the communities calls for strategy and patience.

Anderson says: “It takes a long time to grow a movement. It’s taken me years to have a successful operation and budget in place to bring on new, experienced staff to build on what we’ve accomplished. I’ve adapted and clarified things enough that I can show to donors that if you give us a $1, we will turn it into $5.”

As the self-quarantine period continues, Anderson and her team are making use of the food recovery down time: “Right now we’re planning ahead for when schools resume in the fall. We’re sharing resources for student education, advocacy, and operational efficiency. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Anderson says: “Food recovery is still a new concept for a lot of people and FRN can go a long way to helping to make it commonplace. Unfortunately, with the pandemic and other concerns, some funders are saying ‘not this year.’

“We’re trying to stay as strong as we can be, even in the midst of uncertainty. I know we can get to a much better place if we can get to the next step: Deeper dives into best practices and program evaluation work. If we can create a self-sufficient and self-adapting system for each location, we could scale up to even 2,000 chapters.

Her goal? “We need to understand the DNA of our successful chapters. Why are they successful? What can we fix? What should we duplicate elsewhere? These are the questions we want to answer.”

Let Student Voices Be Heard

No matter how FRN advances in the future, Anderson says that students need to be part of the conversation. They are the Food Recovery Network.

Anderson says: “We need to make space for them, especially as colleges open while implementing health and safety rules. Our students are not large-scale dining or public safety experts, but they can help with peer-to-peer advocacy, even to stop waste at the individual student level to get involved in the recovery efforts. (For example, they can advise: ‘Take 1 piece of chicken at first, not 5.’)

“We always come back to ‘What is the problem?’ and ‘Why are we doing this?’ We know it is this: We’re feeding people. We’re eliminating waste. We’re saving the environment.”

“We believe in the power of young people to make change. We want them to be at the table.”

How does she continue despite setbacks like the pandemic?

“The students really give me hope,” she says. “I get so inspired. I tell them: ‘You are all working so hard. I’m going to keep working by your side just as hard.’ They believe and I believe. That brings me so much joy.”

You can donate to Food Recovery Network here. []