Emily & Susan – How They Rescued One Million Pounds of Food

[00:00:09] Adam: Hello and welcome to Green Champions. 

[00:00:12]  Dominique: Thanks for joining us in a conversation with real people, sharing sustainability success stories. 

[00:00:16] Adam: From entrepreneurs to artists, scientists to activists, this podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Adam. 

[00:00:25]  Dominique: And I'm Dominique. 

[00:00:26] Adam: Today we are joined by Emily Rials and Susan Swinford. Emily and Susan are co-directors for the Columbus Food Rescue, where they manage over 200 weekly food pickups and work closely with donors and agencies to reduce food waste and fight hunger. Today we're really excited to spotlight Emily and Susan as our green champions and learn how they are transforming food rescue efforts to build a more just and sustainable food system. So Emily, Susan, welcome back.

Can you just tell us a little bit, what is a food rescue?

[00:00:52] Susan: A food rescue is just the process of connecting excess food that would be thrown away but is still usable to agencies or people that need it.

[00:01:02] Adam: can you walk us through what it actually looks like managing over 200 weekly pickups?

[00:01:06] Susan: Chaos.

[00:01:07] Emily: So much, so much chaos. We've got about 200 regularly scheduled pickups. And these are anything from a grocery store to a farmer's market, to a school, to a hospital, would be sort of the donor site. And then we have pre-assigned a receiving location for all of those donations, whether a supportive housing or pantry, or a crisis housing shelter or things like this. And our volunteers can go in and sign up for anyone or many of those pickups. And the app sort of talks them through how to get from place to place. And then we also manage the popups, which are things like nine pallets of citrus fruit that have been rejected by a food bank because there's a little bit of spoilage in the pallets. 

 If we don't go get those pallets, the food bank was gonna throw them away, or the trucking company was going to throw them away because they didn't wanna deal with the sorting of the food.

[00:02:12]  Dominique: And that's a real life scenario.

[00:02:14] Emily: That is a today and tomorrow scenario is gonna be nine pallets of citrus fruits. 

[00:02:18]  Dominique: And how frequently do needs of that size occur? 

[00:02:21] Susan: Once or twice a month. 

[00:02:23] Emily: We had three or four popups that were smaller last week. The convention center has something extra or a caterer has something extra, that happens multiple times a week. The multi-pallet, multi-ton rescues are less frequent but not infrequent. 

[00:02:42] Susan: Yeah. I mean, we could have a restaurant that's closing and they've given away a lot of the stuff they can to other restaurants or other people they know, but they've got stuff left. And we can take that because we have Ro's Kitchen named after Roshelle Pate. And the cool thing about the kitchen is that we were able to open this by working through a program that Lucy Cincinnati was spearheading.

And it helped to fund, it was an accelerator program, and so we opened a transformed kitchen, which means that we have chefs that work at the moment at ECDI's Food Fort. Volunteers come in and they take some of that excess food, especially stuff that's really close to the edge if we took it to a pantry, they would have to sort through a lot of it, or it's not exactly in the condition you want to offer it to people, but it's still usable food. The chefs can use the volunteers to take that food, transform it, and then make it into meals.

One of the greatest needs that we encounter, is people asking for ready-made food because food pantries can't do the job for everyone. There are a lot of people who don't have access to a kitchen or couldn't utilize it effectively if they did. And so for those people, ready-made food is really important. If you are unhoused, you can't take food back to a shelter.

[00:03:50]  Dominique: And in some ways you're extending the life of that food. Because if you can cook it or transform it, then you're able to make that not only edible frankly more enjoyable. We all want cooked food. I don't know anybody who's running around eating like a plain uncooked pepper every single day.

[00:04:06] Emily: Like a rock cabbage.

[00:04:07] Susan: There's a cabbage.

[00:04:07]  Dominique: Yes, yeah. Yeah. Rock cabbage is a good example. But The cooking that you're doing at Ro's Kitchen is serving twofold of extending that life, but also putting it in a format that they can enjoy it or making it more nutritious like you're adding more value to that meal. 

[00:04:20] Emily: There's several reasons it's called Ro's Kitchen, but one of them is that when Roshelle was running a pantry, she did have this dream of what could we do with the sort of grosser food that we get? 

[00:04:32]  Dominique: Define grosser.

[00:04:32] Emily: Bruised peaches. So most of the peach is still good, but some of it is damaged andit's not dignified to give that to somebody in a pantry situation. Nobody wants to be offered something that looks subpar, right? That looks like, "Oh, we care less about your eating experience. Here, have this damaged food. But it is still good food if you take the damaged part off."

And so we were constantly trying to help think through what could be done with the stuff that had some damage on the apples or the peppers or what have you even after the damaged parts were sorted out so that the good unblemished stuff could go out on the pantry line, what do you do with this additional food? 

[00:05:12]  Dominique: And the other piece of that, because food frequently comes in bulk. So a distributor will have a pallet that was refused or anything like that, a big bulk store had food that didn't get out fast enough, they've got more coming in. Here's a bunch of pineapples, nobody can live on a box of pineapples alone, but if we take some of this food to the kitchen, those ingredients can be combined in a way. Like that cabbage is a hard thing to work with if you don't have a lot of ideas for what to do with cabbage, but the chefs do.

[00:05:39] Emily: Or other ingredients. 

[00:05:40] Susan: Right.

[00:05:40]  Dominique: So, so to recap, you navigate a food rescue network where volunteers are supporting you in going to actually do the transport of would be wasted food to mouths that can enjoy it and part of that ecosystem is running. And you mentioned that happens at ECDI, which has a Food Fort. Food Fort allows smaller or budding or various food related businesses to have kind of like isolated space in a shared warehouse. And then Ro's Kitchen operates out of one of those bookable kitchen spaces.

Can

 you share for us why this stuff is happening? So you mentioned popups, what is causing a popup? What is the mishap for that food to become wasted? What else is a common occurrence for why this stuff gets wasted?

[00:06:22] Susan: Weather. So say you've got a big event planned and then there's a snow storm. Then many fewer people come, but you've already made all the food 'cause it was ordered. So here are meals, they would be thrown away.

It's a slow day. A lot of bakeries, their model is they need to have enough food so that when people come in, but they bake it fresh every day, they may miscalculate. 

But, there's waste sort of built into the food system, right? Because if you're serving people food, you need to have enough food to feed them, but you don't have a crystal ball, so you don't know when you're gonna run out or when you're gonna have too much. So you're making a little bit more a lot of the time. 

[00:06:56] Emily: And some of that then on a larger scale too, is when you're talking about sort of palletized stuff, you'll have a production warehouse that has brought in produce to fill particular orders. But if something farther down the ecosystem happens and that order gets canceled, that food's not gonna last forever. And so they will sometimes contact us and say, "Can you take whole watermelons or something like this? "

[00:07:22] Susan: Or equipment goes down or electricity goes out, or the freezers are 

[00:07:26] Emily: Oh my God, the chicken.

[00:07:27] Adam: There's so many ways in which problems occur and the result is it happens at home, right? Like you did, you got food to make meals, and then you got invited out and you didn't cook that chicken and now, there are all sorts of occurrences. So it's a really interesting way as you do the work to start thinking more consciously about what you do at home, right? So it sounds like this is infinitely complex. Things are always changing. What are the big operational challenges with managing such a wild system?

[00:07:54] Susan: Timing. When you're working with restaurants, well, you're working with all the donors who have their own particular times when it's best to pick up. You've got pantries that have different hours you need to be aware of, when does the pantry next serve? Do they have storage capacity? Storage is a huge limit for anyone's efforts. 'Cause you kind of have to take food when it's available, but you have to have somewhere to store it that keeps it in a good enough position or you need to have enough volunteers or staff to be able to get it out.

[00:08:21]  Dominique: Can anyone call you? Like if, let's say I have a wedding or put on event, I can call you? So any listener?

[00:08:28] Emily: Yes.

[00:08:28]  Dominique: In your jurisdiction?

[00:08:29] Emily: Yes. 

[00:08:30]  Dominique: If you're gonna clean out your pantry, and that's great, everybody should do it periodically. Clean out your pantry. If you're realistically not gonna use that food before it reaches expiration date or before it reaches the point at which you feel comfortable using it, get it out before then, right? But there are blessing boxes, there are community fridges, there are places we could send you. 

How would you recommend they look for resources?

[00:08:51] Emily: There is a robust blessing box system in Columbus. So they're sort of freestanding wooden structures that have doors. These are, listeners, for non-perishable foods. So you do not put bread in a blessing box. You do not put produce in a blessing box. You do not put prepared food in a blessing box. It will go bad. It will bring rodents. But canned food, pasta, things like this sometimes people will put in hygiene products like toothbrushes and things.

[00:09:17]  Dominique: Unopened package goods.

[00:09:17] Emily: Exactly. There are now three community fridges in Columbus. Two of them are operated by an organization called Food 4 All Cbus. One is at Crossroads actually on town and Cypress. And one is outside the Citadel on the south side at Parsons and Woodrow, I think. And then Bexley actually just opened one last week, which is very exciting. It's called the Fridge.

[00:09:42]  Dominique: That's really cute. 

[00:09:43] Emily: And in those spaces you're talking about perishable stuff. So if you're leaving food, it's gotta be think what you would want your leftovers to look like plus labels. Ideally a label of when the food was made and what's in it in case there are allergens or people are taking food that like they've got dietary restrictions. But produce that you got because you were gonna make a recipe and then you realize you're not gonna make that recipe and the produce you'd still eat it, but

[00:10:10]  Dominique: Stuff that you can't put in the blessing box could go into this.

[00:10:12] Emily: Exactly. Yep. 

[00:10:13] Susan: If You had a conference and you expect a certain number of people come, you've got these prepared lunches and you're wondering, " Is there a place for these 50 prepared lunches to go?" So we can either come and pick them up, we can get a volunteer to do it.

But the flip side of it is also. It should get you thinking more about the food you waste at home. Are you composting? I do a thing that's, I call it 'Refrigerator Soup,' but periodically I go through and all the random things that are in my fridge that I haven't used, I make soup with it. I will throw all in it and it gets you to be creative, right? And to think about your own food waste.

 We are inviting people to think about if you've had a catered event or if you're working with a caterer at your wedding. And do you wanna ask the caterer, " Is there a way that the excess food could go somewhere? Do you have a system for that?" Getting people to ask the questions, to encourage people within the system to think about, " Am I wasting a lot of food? Is this built in? Can we set this up?" Because sometimes people think it's too much trouble to deal with it, and it's not. 

And one of the things we really encourage people to think about is food of all sorts matters to us. Everybody deserves a treat sometimes, and everybody deserves to be able to make their own choices about what food they eat.

We don't choose only healthy food all the time. And it's a luxury to get to make those choices, to get to choose which food you eat. So being able to pick up donuts and take them somewhere so that people can choose whether they eat that food or not, or they can celebrate something exciting about their day matters.

all the food matters in different ways because food is choice. It's opportunity, it's

[00:11:45] Emily: It's power. 

[00:11:46]  Dominique: Can you drop any resources or recommendations for how to find resources near them if listeners are different locations within the US or even international?

[00:11:55] Emily: If you were to search for the name of your location and either food rescue or food recovery, probably anything that's doing something similar would come up. 

Food Rescue US has a network across multiple states, so if you go to foodrescue.us, there's a map and you can see all the different sites that use that particular technology, which is the technology we use.

There's also Last Mile Food Recovery. There's Hunger Relief Network in Cleveland. There's 412 Food Rescue in Pittsburgh. Many large cities have a, a variation on this and more. if you look for community fridges, Philadelphia has a pretty robust community fridge network where they have essentially food rescue that is stocking those fridges, and that's the work they're doing instead of like a food bank warehouse that's going to individual fridges. But those are kind of the search terms to use and you'll find all the stuff.

[00:12:52] Adam: So for like a restaurant or a caterer who has liability concerns about, "Hey, I'm not sure about giving my food, how do you respond to people about that?"

[00:13:00] Susan: You're covered. The Bill Emerson Act and the modifications, the sort of making it more robust means that there's actually legal protection, right? If you are donating food in good faith, you are protected. There's really been an effort to try and make sure that people understand, "Yes, we need that excess food not to be wasted. It's environmentally harmful when it goes into landfill and people need food." We produce enough food to feed everyone. We are just not getting it to everyone. It's worth remembering. There are plenty of people making that choice. Will I have enough food? Who does that food go to? So recognizing that if we're producing enough food to feed everyone, then we should be making an effort to make sure it gets out there. 

[00:13:42]  Dominique: Can you just re-clarify what that Good Samaritan Act states?

[00:13:46] Emily: So the Bill Emerson Act, I think was passed in the nineties and then there was a sort of reclarification and expansion of it as the Food Donation Improvement Act in 2022. So, and it was expanded and it essentially says, if you are donating that food in good faith and you believe it not to be spoiled, you believe it not to be hazardous, then you are covered from legal liability if someone were to get sick. 

[00:14:12]  Dominique: There are things you can do to feel better about it from your own. What are the standards in your own kitchen, whether it's ingredient labeling, whether it's date labeling, whether it's making sure that you are keeping track of time, temperature control.Whatever the things are that make you feel most comfortable about saying, in good faith, "I am donating this," that's great and we're happy to work with you to figure out how to make that doable, but you are covered that food is wanted. 

[00:14:36] Adam: You've completed a needs assessment with community groups. Are there certain things that you've learned about food gaps or quality of food that people are looking for?

[00:14:45] Susan: Meat, dairy products, some of those things are things that tend to be donated less often or become available for people less often. Eggs, when eggs got more expensive, were super hard for places to have. But if you think about it, sometimes what's needed is the stuff that you can use to make a meal. 

 Also, the stuff that helps people make the food that is home for them. A lot of times what we want is food that makes us feel comfortable or food that makes us excited. Food that is the kind of food we shared when we were growing up.

And sometimes that requires other ingredients or things that we don't always think about people needing. But different groups, different cultures, different regions of the US use different food. And so one of the things like when we have a food drive or ask people to make donations, later in the year, in November and December, some of what we're looking for is the stuff our kitchen needs to fill in the gaps, right? The oil or the flour. But also stuff that we can donate to pantries and blessing boxes because those pantry staples are things that people who are getting a lot of their food fromfood pantries, need in order to be able to make a whole meal. 

[00:15:51] Emily: So we work with a lot of folks who have diabetes or who have, are gluten-free or are vegan, and it's really hard to find those kinds of foods at even the best stocked food pantries, let alone the pantries that are not getting bulk donations all the time.

And the third was religious reasons.

So are you able to find kosher food or are you able to find Halal food at pantries or at stores? Are they accessible to you to buy if you see it at a store?

And that has also been something that's really lovely about having Ro's Kitchen, is that we've been able to work, like we work with Muslim Family Services and we've worked some with My Project USA on trying to make sure that we're taking prepared meals for some of the folks who are coming through there who don't want pork products in their meals or who want to make sure that it's vegetarian or vegan.

We're such acolytes for blessing boxes and community fridges and things like this and community drops, mutual aid organizations all over the city. Some of what that means is trying really hard when we can to direct food that is culturally relevant and nutritionally appropriate for the groups that we work with because the food will go to waste if it shows up at a place that's not gonna eat it.

[00:17:07] Susan: If you wanna talk about a different kind of gap, is that food gets dropped off somewhere and that's fabulous. And a pantry will serve all the food they can during their hours and say they close on Friday and they don't have hours again until Monday or Tuesday, that food's gonna sit and it's probably going to go bad or some of it will. So one of the biggest gaps is getting food somewhere, like moving it once it's been donated the first time or a Jewish organization received a donation of hams. 

[00:17:35] Emily: 40 hams. Not just one. 40 hams. 

[00:17:38]  Dominique: Wow.

[00:17:39] Susan: And it is absolutely food that's great.

[00:17:42] Emily: It was during the holidays.

[00:17:44] Susan: It's not appropriate there, but they can call us and we can move those hands.

[00:17:49]  Dominique: Redirect that food.

[00:17:50] Susan: And so that is a gap we fill in trying to figure out, "Oh, plantains? You say the people coming to this pantry aren't that interested? There's definitely community that wants plantains." So a lot of the work we do is that behind the scenes, figuring out how to get culturally appropriate food to a place where the people who want it can access it readily.

[00:18:12]  Dominique: And often people do have a blanketed idea of " Oh, food banks are always looking for food." Or food banks are, " We can just keep giving them what they need and people will come eat it." But I think this idea of there's deeper complexity there that their hours are limited. We need other solutions. 

So I think the idea of we need to vary the opportunities is obviously very clear.

So looking more at the work that you're doing and the impact you're having, how do you measure the impact of your food rescue efforts? Are there certain metrics that you point to our storytelling pieces just for us to get a sense of the impact you're having? 

[00:18:46] Susan: One of the nicest things for me is when we go into a place where they thought they weren't gonna have enough food to serve people that day, they know they're gonna get 60 families. They didn't have that much. We happen to have a popup that we could redirect there and a really nice part of this job is seeing the relief not on the faces of people who are getting the food, but relief on the faces of the people who are gonna be helping to make that food available. When they realize, "Oh, we've got more food to get out." So that's a personal metric for me. Like I love to be able to solve problems for people who are working in their communities to get food. There are also a lot of metrics that you can use.

[00:19:22] Emily: Perhaps the easiest one to measure is pounds of food. It's pretty easy to measure pounds of food picked up and delivered and therefore pounds of food kept outta the landfill. And you can put that into the ReFED Impact Calculator and it will tell you how many metric tons of CO2 equivalent, it will tell you how many gallons of water. And those metrics are fascinating 

To give you what those numbers would actually be we, on average rescue about a million pounds of food annually. We work with about 75 active food donors and we serve anywhere between 75 and a 100 receiving sites. Some of those are multiple sort of locations that are overseen by the same community group. But like in terms of literal addresses, it's about a hundred that we work with on a regular basis.

We've said before about 200 rescues in a week, give or take the weird popups. We tend to have about 175 to 200 volunteers actively working with us over the course of a few months. 

Pounds is particularly tricky because of what we've been talking about, which is a 50 pound bag of cabbage is not the same poundage as 50 pounds of prepared meals, right? Like the mileage literally there varies. The other part of that is that we rescue about a million pounds of food a year. The Franklin County landfill gets a little under a million pounds of food waste a day. So in a year, we can roughly make up for a day of what the landfill is getting. And that is a really useful metric for talking about like the scale of the problem and the scale of the opportunity that exists to continue to do the thing.

Unless you're talking about how many different complexities there are in those pounds of food, it can mask the work. It can mask the scale of the problem, which is that you can drop 5,000 pounds of food somewhere. But if it's food that's not it's food that is actually inedible or it's food that is not culturally relevant or logistically usable for the people at that location, it's a wash.

[00:21:28] Susan: Now if somebody's listening and they're like, "Hey, I wanna help be able to move more of this food around", what can they do You go on the website, you sign up to be a volunteer, you look at the schedule and you see, " Oh, I can do that rescue. I have time that day." Or you check every morning, or you check the mornings you have free. And that's really useful. We have a couple people and they are gods among mere mortals because they will get up in the morning and they'll be like, "Oh, I do have extra time today." And they'll look at what people didn't claim the night before 'cause the site automatically sends out this reminder, "Hey, we've got some rescues available tomorrow. Could you help?" And so people will look at the email there, the text, and they'll go in and there's a little flurry in the evening.

And then Emily, and I'll check late at night 'cause we have to see are there 13 unclaimed rescues? Are there, is there one to see how we're gonna divide up the day. But there are a couple people who are like, let me go on and pick the ones that you don't like, or the ones that are hard, or the ones that are weird. 

[00:22:20] Emily: They will sometimes text us and say, "I could do this one, this one, or this one. Which would you prefer? "

[00:22:24] Susan: And so there are all kinds of people, people who have a regular schedule. or they're people who, do it when they can. Or there are people who will send out occasionally a text that's "Hey, without a tardis, we can't get these done today, any anyway you could help?" And they'll go and do something then. there is no one way to volunteer with us that's the best because we need it all. 

We had a volunteer who taught his daughter to drive, you have to do your 50 hours of driving. So he is like, "All right, we'll do rescues." So they did.

[00:22:53]  Dominique: Oh I love that. That's amazing.

[00:22:54] Emily: And you get all different kinds of driving doing it because you're getting a highway. 

[00:22:58] Susan: Pull into weird places and you have to get comfortable finding addresses. And then his daughter went off to college and worked to found a group that did food rescue there because she was so 

[00:23:08]  Dominique: Beautiful. Wow. Full circle moment.

[00:23:11] Susan: But I love when people are like, are there rescues that are good for "Will I not, I have to get outta the car because I wanna take my kids with me." And they've got little kids and it's a mom who wants to get out and do more and start, getting your kid thinking about these things early.

[00:23:23]  Dominique: I think that there's not a lot of opportunities like this where you can volunteer and bring someone along with you. Like literally you could put anybody in the car.

We go around to the vendors at the end of a farmer's market. And if you wanna go to that farmer's market anyway, or you wanna you've got family in town and you wanna show your family this farmer's market, what better way to do itAlso feels like a really beautiful way for anyone who in a new city, If you just moved to a new city and you wanna have an excuse to get out there, meet people and do it in like kind of a facilitated way, " wow, food rescue is your ticket."

Well, I know we need to wrap up here. We've had so much of your wonderful time. I'll ask you one quick question each.

If you could just briefly tell us if you had a magic wand, and you could, make the impact happen that you think would really "fix," I'm putting fix in quotes, "fix" this waste problem, 

[00:24:09] Emily: I would say, I would like everybody to recognize that access to food is a human right, that people deserve to eat. And it isn't an issue of morality like you did enough work or you didn't do enough work. Every human being deserves to eat. And we can't fix a lot of problems societally unless we have people who are eating enough to be able to function well. My version of that was going to be pay everyone a livable wage. Because if people can afford to feed themselves and can afford to choose the food they want and need for themselves and their family, then you've got less grocery store waste. You've got fewer people at pantries. everybody should be able to afford to eat what they want to eat, when they want to eat it, how they want to eat it, period. And that will get things started.

[00:24:54] Susan: When you're looking at metrics, it's incredibly daunting to recognize the amount of waste. A recent stat was that if you took the land in California and New York, the land in those two states could be devoted to growing the food we waste in the US every year. So if you think of the massive scale of waste, and that's the same thing that goes with the, we rescue a million pounds and every day, like a year, a day.

But the nice thing about the work that we're doing and the reason we want people to volunteer, one, we talk about it as service, but like we like to talk about it as working alongside people. We're not doing something for people, we're doing something in the community that we all benefit from. When people have food, when people are treated with dignity, then the community is stronger. 

So there's a huge scale for the problem. But there are local ways to start to change mindsets, to start to think about them that allow us all to become part of changing the way we look at food and access and justice. And it's all tied up.

 Food is central to all of these other questions. You can't get a good education if you haven't eaten, you can't work well. You can't put yourself forward in all these different ways to do the things we need to do, to contribute to our own lives, to contribute to society, whatever you call that.

[00:26:12]  Dominique: So food is pretty central to building connections, to building selves, to building identity. Thank you both for sharing all that you do and teaching us a lot about liability and about how to donate, how to find resources, how to get out there and get active, how to think differently, how to maybe turn a joy ride into a act of service. So thank you so, so much. 

How can listeners connect with the work that you're doing?

[00:26:37] Emily: We are a program of Local Matters. So you can find all the information about how to donate financially, donate food, get involved as a volunteer at the Local Matters website, which is www.local-matters.org. And there's a tab that is Columbus Food Rescue. We are on Instagram. Our handle is @cbusfoodrescue. And we are on Facebook at Columbus Food Rescue. 

[00:27:02] Adam: Thank you both for, for joining us today. It's been an absolute pleasure. Just I felt like I learned so much about food waste and, 

[00:27:07] Emily: That's our goal.

[00:27:08] Adam: You might see me signing up on the website to go drive, so I would love that. As always, our guests have found a unique way to champion sustainability. We're here to put real names and stories behind the idea that no matter your background, career, or interests, you really can contribute in the fight against climate change. 

[00:27:22]  Dominique: You can find our episodes at thegreenchampions.com. If you wanna stay in the loop, give us a review and follow us on your favorite podcast platform. If you have questions about climate change or sustainability, you can reach us on our website, thegreenchampions.com. Our music is by Zayn Dweik. Thanks for listening to Green Champions. We'll dig into our next sustainability success story in our next episode.