Regina Harmon - Why 235 Million Tons of Food Goes to Waste While 47 Million Go Hungry

[00:00:10] Christy: 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] Christy: This podcast is a platform for green champions to share their stories and plant new ideas. I'm Christy. 

[00:00:22] Dominique: And I'm Dominique. 

[00:00:23] Christy: Today we're back with Regina Harmon, the CEO of Food Recovery Network, a national nonprofit and the largest student-led movement, fighting food waste and hunger in the US.

You can listen to last week's episode to hear more about Regina's personal journey and what led her to this work. Regina, welcome back.

[00:00:39] Regina: Thanks so much. So excited to be with you both.

[00:00:43] Dominique: Yeah. Regina, I'm so stoked that you're back. In our last conversation, we got to talk about how your upbringing in the Northeast fed a love for nature and how that kinda shaped your point of view. We talked about your unique perspective and just kind of passion for power of race and history and how those are so connected to the way we walk around the world day to day, but also how we talk about food.

And I also just love that you found your love for food access young, like in college, not everybody knows their life's mission in college, and you really ran with it, and it connects so well to the fact that you work with students and get to kind of like light that fire for them. So I'm so excited to get into this episode with the Food Recovery Network.

So let's kick off there. how do you define food recovery?

[00:01:29] Regina: To answer your question food recovery for us, that is the act of packaging up surplus food from a variety of different places in our food system, and then bringing that food to locations where people are experiencing hunger. So at Food Recovery Network, we recover surplus food from all the way from the farm field to industry settings.

So higher education, institutions, hospitals, grocery stores, anywhere right before we get up to our individual homes. But we have lots of tips on how to recover food from there. And we say surplus food, so this is food that doesn't necessarily have a location to go to next. So on the farm field it might be a farmer has grown a bunch of blueberries and they have contracts for a certain number of pints or crates or pallets of blueberries. But then they have all these extra blueberries because things are going really well, the yield is higher. If they don't have a customer or a place, a purchaser for those blueberries, a lot of times those blueberries will just stay on the farm.

And either they're fed to animals or they just get tilled back under. Surplus food, meaning during transportation, a lot of times if a window to deliver food is missed, a lot of times the grocery store or the location will say, "Nope, sorry, we can't take that whole entire tractor trailer of cabbage," you gotta send it back.

So surplus food happens for a lot of different reasons where there might not be surplus food one week, there might be surplus food this week. And so it's anything that is extra that doesn't necessarily have a home where that food will get eaten.

[00:03:00] Christy: I like that you said, you are finding those areas where there's surplus, there are connections that's being made to make sure it gets to the people that need some food. And Food Recovery Network is also a student-led movement. It was created by students you mentioned, but it's student-led, so there's some student involvement. Tell us more about that. For someone who might not be familiar with the organization, how do the students interact with the organization and make all of these great things happen?

[00:03:26] Regina: Absolutely. Students are our secret sauce for sure. So much love and dedication and resiliency. So yeah, we are started by college students at the University of Maryland who saw a lot of their food, perfectly good food being thrown away. They had work studies, so they literally had a job in the cafeteria on their college campus.

And at the end of their shift were told to throw the food away. 

So they saw this happening in their day-to-day lives and wanted to do something about it. And so they started Food Recovery Network at UMD. And then literally called up their friends to say like, Hey, we're doing this over here. You should think about doing it too. So very much a grassroots organization powered by young people spreading the word of how we can do things better.

So students, well, actually, they are the ones we train everyone on how to handle food safely 'cause food safety is number one. We have to make sure that the food stays at the temperatures it's supposed to stay at or if it gets, frozen or refrigerated so that the food continues to be perfectly safe to eat for others.

So our student chapters, of which we have over 215 at this point, all across the United States, we're in 46 states. They will go into their dining hall or a surrounding food business. And we've got the hair nets, the gloves and the students will literally package up any of the surplus food that has been prepared, that just didn't make it out, that didn't get sold, and then they'll package up that food into usually, aluminum foil, aluminum trays. We do have some silicone trays or buckets that we use, bags. And then they'll bring that food once it's been safely packaged to various locations, various nonprofits near their college campus. So this is a national organization with a local solution.

The students will drive, bike, walk the food to a church, a homeless shelter, soup kitchen, afterschool programs. Locations near their campus where those locations then go on to feed their neighbors experiencing hunger. A lot of our students will also keep the food right on their campus.

They'll bring the food to a food pantry on their own college campus to help their student body, who is also experiencing food insecurity. So the food, we have over 400 different locations where we actively bring surplus food and this is all powered by college students. These incredible student leaders who have a chapter that they foster, maintain, work to get volunteers, ensure the health and vitality of the chapter year over year once students graduate and move on to the next stages and chapters in their life, that there's still students on that college campus that can, maintain the FRN chapter. 

[00:05:54] Christy: If I recall, you were the first executive director that Food Recovery Network hired that wasn't part of, and that you weren't part of the original students, right? Oh my gosh. So, number one, I think that's cool and I bet you've got some thoughts on that too, but also I'm curious, when you took that role, what did you think? 

[00:06:14] Regina: I knew that based on where my career was going, based on where my skill sets were, natural and otherwise that this was something that I really wanted to do.

And I'd had another role years before working very much with college students. So I knew it was an age group that jazzed me up. And so knowing too, again, anti-poverty work, working with college students doing this awesome stuff, food as the bridge to how we can treat people better, for me, it checked all of the boxes.

And so I applied for the position because the original founders were moving on, they'd started another company altogether. And so I felt that I had the skills to help grow the organization and, hopefully increase the impact and the momentum of what the organization is able to do.

And I think, 10 years on it's still in motion. But I'm really proud of what we've been able to do over these last 10 plus years.

[00:07:03] Dominique: You really are in this very beautiful connection of problem and solution where you are able to work on such a big problem, but handle it in a local really community oriented way and not every problem has that magic fit. So I wanna step into the problem for a second too because you have so much deep knowledge of this problem. And I wanna just unpack it briefly. So you talked about surplus and why some of that shows up and I'm so grateful you did.

I wanna imagine that some of our listeners are not as aware of how big the problem is. And so let's imagine someone maybe is thinking like there's not that much surplus. What can all these chapters be doing? And with that in mind, can you explain a little bit of is food waste the result of individual decisions or is this a big food system issue broadly?

[00:07:51] Regina: Great questions. So, just to give some context to the problem that Food Recovery Network and other peer groups are working on. In 2023 alone, 235 million tons of food went uneaten or unsold. That is a massive amount of food and that's, all across the food system. And we know to this day, the number one item that's clogging up our landfills is food.

It's not cars, it's not diapers, it's not furniture, it's food. And of all of that food that is clogging up landfill, a vast number of that food, tonnage of that food is still perfectly good to eat. So that's the problem. There's way too much food going into the number one destination landfill.

It's not being fed to animals, it's not being anaerobically digested, it's not necessarily being composted. Those things are happening, but the number one place our food goes that we don't consume is in landfill. So that's a dizzying system, dizzying process where to this day, 47 million people are food insecure.

So when we think to your other question about, is it individual or is it a system wide?

It is definitely both. When we think about the system, that is where large volumes of food are being thrown away unnecessarily. And, on the beautiful side, there are so many companies, organizations like Food Recovery Network and others that are working really hard to make food recovery the norm and not the exception.

But again, this is, whole entire tractor trailer trucks of fill in the blank food that is being diverted into landfill because they missed a delivery timeframe. There are label changes on food that, require people to, we don't want the old label on the shelf, so you gotta take out all that product, even if it's still perfectly good to eat.

There's confusion around date labels, and we can get into that in a little bit too. Again, surplus at the harvest level means a lot of that food is getting tilled under. So that's at the system level and at the individual level, yes. In fact, the majority of food waste happens at the individual home level. Not by much. It's seems pretty much, systems level to our individual home level, but for us as individuals, that's where we can really start saving our money, where we can really respect our incredible farmers. Treating our food with dignity and respect and gaining more knowledge about not necessarily just where our food comes from, which is so important, but gaining, regaining the power knowledge of when is this food still safe to eat for my family and when is it not? And that is a whole amount of knowledge that over time has been lost to a lot of people.

[00:10:28] Dominique: And somebody might think, well, there's so much surplus, why aren't we just donating more of that? Can you just kind of tell us what prevents food donation from happening consistently? 

[00:10:38] Regina: So there's a few reasons why there are barriers to food recovery and I'll say in no order of importance, but these are barriers that are happening.

Number one is we've configured food to be thrown away as the norm. So when we think about, at the end of an event that has food, the configuration is you just throw that food away. It's fast to do, it's easy to do the contract with the waste hauler is already in place. You just throw the food away. That's how it's been configured. And people are trained towards that. And so when you come in and you say, Hey, instead of dumping all that amazing rice pilaf off f to the left into a trash bin, could we actually dump it over to the right into an aluminum pan and we can now recover it?

It's asking people to do something differently. And we have so much expertise on this that it actually doesn't take that much to reconfigure a system so that we're now recovering food instead of throwing it away. But, like any elephant in the room or any mole that's now a mountain hill, sometimes asking people to do something slightly different just feels like it's gonna be a big thing, and so therefore we don't. So the configuration around throwing food away, there's a long tradition there. The second is people think that they're gonna get sued. They have fear around legal issues, and so then therefore they say well, we can't, I'm not legally allowed to. And we do have two different federal laws that say, in fact, you can donate food including prepared food. And in fact, across administrations it's encouraged. And so the thing is, we can get sued at any time. We could hang up from this incredible podcast conversation and Christy might say, "I didn't like what Regina was saying. I'm gonna sue her," so we can get sued at any point. But there is two federal laws. Basically the first one being the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Law in 1996 that says, if you donate food in good faith, you won't be held liable. That doesn't mean you won't get sued. But if you're doing this in good faith, and the beautiful thing too is that there's no case law.

But the idea that that could happen is really preventing a lot of companies from doing the right thing with their surplus food.

[00:12:41] Dominique: we have a lot of built up fear around things that are really not founded. And I'm glad you mentioned that.

[00:12:47] Regina: Yeah. Fear is real. And that's why, at Food Recovery Network, we always tell people, if you're interested, come on over. There's no shame, there's no guilt. Open hearts and open minds over here. We're here to help. And we pilot a lot of times with companies because they might not understand what it could look like for the full system so they'll start small. That's amazing. And so as long as somebody is willing, then we can go from there.

[00:13:09] Christy: We were talking about legislation. I kind of wanna talk about that a little bit more, and I wanna talk about the Food Date Labeling Act because FRN helped with that and your students played a role in that. So I think what I'd like for you to do is tell us what that is. What role did you play and what benefit is this paying society to today?

[00:13:31] Regina: Yes. So this Food Date Labeling Act has been put forward as a piece of legislation for many, many, many years now. It's really, I think, kind of sad that it hasn't been taken up as of yet, hasn't been voted on as of yet. But some of the beautiful things about it is that it is a coalition of nonprofits industry that are trying to push for this Food Date Labeling Act.

And so we, Food Recovery Network are one of many awesome champions. And so, a lot of the data around the Food Date Labeling Act comes from the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic. Emily Broad Leib, who is an incredible person, so shout out to Emily. They did research that showed about 80% of homes at some point are gonna throw food away because they're confused about date labeling.

And it's something like, I don't, I'm not sure if it's like the majority of households already believe that date labels are federally standardizend they're not. There's something like 50 different labels that might appear on packaged foods. So, package of crackers, those bags of spinach or green beans.

Sometimes there's a use by, best by, freeze by, freshest by. Sometimes, just a random date, and it's confusing for people. And so the Food Date Labeling Act, we've lent our voice to this. So I have actually gone on to the hill in Washington, DC to talk with members elected officials at the house and at the Senate to discuss the Food Date Labeling Act that we need to federally standardize date labels by as a safety mechanism. And then best by for a quality. You're not gonna get sick, but, it's better to have consumed this by certain point. These are dates that make sense to people, and so the date labeling act is to say we need to federally standardize this.

It says that when we do this, there is what we call a budget score of zero. Meaning we don't need any money from the federal government to make this happen. And so again, no matter who's in Congress right now, it's okay, we don't need a $1.2 million, $2 trillion, $2 billion make this a reality. We can actually start this right now. And Industry, so again, the people who, package up our food, they've signed on. And many are actually already using those two labeling standards right now. But Until we sort of all do it, that confusion will kind of continue to stay there. And actually we know because of Harvard, that the confusion is actually only getting worse. So the urgency is here, people are unnecessarily wasting food when food is already so expensive simply because they don't want to get their families sick. They don't wanna hurt their families. And also from my perspective, with recovering food, so many millions of tons of surplus food are being denied to food banks because they can't accept the food because of the confusion around date labeling. The food is still perfectly good to eat, but all of these food banks that desperately need this food, have to say no. So when we standardize the date labels, then that access to food can grow deeper and wider for people who are experiencing hunger.

[00:16:23] Dominique: That's amazing. And like I'm glad you mentioned just how many of different kinds of labels are out there 'cause people don't understand that, don't understand how lack of regulation exists. Is there a way that you connect with the everyday person and educate around this as well?

[00:16:36] Regina: Yes. So we do a lot of education around this. And the first thing that we do, just in terms of an advocacy approach, because this is a policy, and again, our policy sets the decorum of how we want to treat people. And so when we set this as a policy, when we federally standardize date labels ot of the confusion will eventually, sort of dissipate. And so, at a policy level, that does mean we have to get in touch with our elected officials. And so I always start by saying to folks, we have like trackers and stuff and where you can find who your house of representative number is and who your two senators are, and when you call them, which you should call them, save that number in your phone because you'll need to call them for all kinds of stuff. This is just one of those things, but we need to normalize calling our elected officials so they can hear from us. "Thank you so much for doing X. Hey, I wanted to know about Y. When are you gonna do Z?"

[00:17:30] Dominique: I feel like you're unlocking a thing that I think Gen Z would love, which is like, why aren't your senators on speed dial? Like I feel like that is what you're getting at is just make it easy for yourself. Make them accessible. 

[00:17:40] Regina: And when we tell people about, when you call your elected officials, you do not need to be an expert. You do not need to be like so eloquent. You can just try to say things like, are you supporting the Food Date Labeling Act?

And if they say, I'm not sure. If they say no, we're not, ask them why. Ask them, when will you get back in touch with me to let me know if you are going to support this piece of legislation? It could be super fast. And so we really wanna encourage people to normalize getting in touch with their elected officials.

And then even so at the federal level, yes. And then as we go further into our most immediate communities, does your community have a food recovery plan? So you can get in touch with your city council members to figure that out because your community, there are restaurants there, there are maybe urban farms there, there's food all around us. And so that's another opportunity to understand what does my immediate community do with our surplus food? And we should be doing something. Does our community, does our community's strategic plan, have a food recovery mandate in it. You could just find that out. Does it? Most of the time it won't.

If it doesn't, when is the next strategic plan gonna be in place? And can we put a food recovery mandate in place? We're not asking people now if you want that and you have to write the mandate. No, no, no, no, no. But until we start using our voice, our elected officials don't know that that's something that is important to us.

And I will say across all aisles, your elected officials, they do want to hear from you. They absolutely do. All of them have people on their teams. Their whole job is to make note of who calls and for why they are calling. So it's really important that we normalize vocalizing the things that we want to see in our communities. 

[00:19:20] Christy: I wanna come back from some federal policy and I wanna talk about Food Recovery Network just a little bit more. And I actually wanna talk a little bit about your leadership specifically. You were the first executive director hired, I believe that has now become a CEO position, which means you've got upgraded again.

Congrats. And so that is a compliment to your vision and the accomplishments of everyone that's involved. And I wanna go back to a couple of things. 215 chapters, 46 states, you've doubled the student network from 4,000 to 8,000. So basically what I wanna know is why? How? But try to think about that. What was your vision that made this growth possible? What did you bring that was uniquely you, Regina?

[00:20:06] Regina: Thank you so much. When I said I wanted to be an executive director, when I made that, I vocalized it and I was like, okay. I said it, now I have to do it. I wanted to be an executive director for very specific reasons. In my career, I had never had a boss that overly inspired me, a direct boss. I had seen a lot of toxic environments in different places that I was at, and I saw a lot of people languishing. And I just didn't want that to happen. We joined the nonprofit sector for a lot of reasons and a lot of really good reasons. And so for me, being an executive director now, CEO, what that meant for me was I want a place where people feel respected.

They feel connected to the work and that we are building a culture of trust and transparency and where people can really, sort of be themselves as they're doing the work. And we have a very specific culture at Food Recovery Network and I'm really very proud of that. we have a way higher than average tenure on our team.

There's a bunch of people that have been, I've been 10 plus years, they've been seven plus years, five years. And I think that that was really what I wanted to bring to FRN. I saw how hard the students were working to do what they're trying to do. So I too come from a background of resiliency of deep passion and being able to infuse that with individual leadership so that we can multiply our given gifts in the pursuit of feeding people. So this idea that, food recovery to become the norm, normalizing access to food for all of us. Again, being born into a system where that's not true just yet, I know that it's gonna be a very long journey.

So we have to study ourselves for this very long journey, and I have come to so many mountaintops, during my time at Food Recovery Network. We really are making such great strides with our partners out in the wild as well, making such incredible strides. But we still must go on, there's still a long journey ahead of us. And so being able to make sure that FRN is incredibly healthy, spiritually and also within our abilities financially, those kinds of things are deeply important to me. So I brought all of that into, the vision for FRN.

[00:22:15] Dominique: That was the most beautiful bow to tie around our conversation today, I think. And thank you so much for how you show up in the world and the things that you do every day. Truly, I know it's hard and I can only imagine right now we haven't even scratched the fact that you're doing mission-driven nonprofit work at universities at the most complex period of time.

You also educated us on the root cause of food waste and our flawed relationship with date labels, which I know we could talk about each of those things for like hours. I also have firsthand had some exposure to semi truckloads of beautiful produce that was selected for how perfect it is going to the grocery store and been aware of the fact that there are so many logistical things that might send that truck right to the landfill.

And there are things we can do, but there's so many reasons that that shouldn't be happening. And I'm really grateful you shed light on why that's going on. 

How can listeners connect with you and support this work that you're doing?

[00:23:11] Regina: Yes, so please go to our website, foodrecoverynetwork.org. Would love to connect with you if there are large scale events that people know of, conferences, it's like conference season coming up. We wanna make sure that Food Recovery Network is at those conferences to recover surplus food from those events.

I definitely have my CEO hat on. Financial contributions are always so welcomed to help us buy the supplies that we need to ensure that food recovery is happening. We have some really cool programming that we've expanded over the last few years. So, donations really help to ensure that our programming can continue to expand.

Well, thank you so much, Regina. Each guest brings a different approach to sustainability. We're here to highlight the people doing the work that inspires others and us. And we do this because climate action takes many forms.

[00:23:58] Dominique: As always, you can find our episodes and support the show at thegreenchampions.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please follow, subscribe, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Take it with us on LinkedIn and Instagram, @greenchampionspod. 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.