Ben Simon is Founder and Executive Director of the Food Recovery Network. He is a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, studying government and politics and nonprofit management. Ben is also the Founder of MyMaryland.net.
In August 2010, the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, was just like most colleges in America: it sent all of the unsold, surplus food from campus dining halls and sports games to landfills or composting facilities. Tens of thousands of pounds worth of edible food was wasted yearly.
While everyone in UMD’s Dining Services hated to see good food go to waste, they were reluctant to take on the extra costs of donating leftovers. When my fellow students and I got wind of this, we formed what would become the Food Recovery Network (FRN). Our mission is to recover the food that would otherwise be wasted from our campus dining halls, sports games, and surrounding communities, and donate it to people in need of a meal.
The result was overwhelming. In our first few recoveries at UMD, we donated approximately 150 to 200 meals per night of delicious food – chicken tenders, ribs, fresh fruit and vegetables, salmon, and my personal favorite: crab cakes.
At UMD, we began with just one night a week at one diner on campus. But before long, other student groups wanted in. So, we began to form a literal network of 11 different student groups – service and social justice groups, religious groups, and even a military group – that each take a different night of the week at a different dining hall. Our unique model of having different student organizations take ownership of their own night made it possible for us to become UMD’s largest on-campus service project within a month of officially becoming a student group, and enabled us to donate 30,000 meals in our first year.
But, while loading up trash bags bursting with hot dog buns at sporting events and carrying trays upon trays of pasta and steak from the diners, it’s difficult to imagine that just a couple years ago all of this food was going to waste.
Going back decades, how many hundreds of thousands or even millions of people could UMD alone have fed if Food Recovery Network had been in place? And why doesn’t every college in America have a Food Recovery Network?
We soon realized we weren’t the only ones asking these questions. Last January, two game changers transformed our UMD extra-curricular into a national nonprofit. First, some friends of ours at Brown University officially formed the second FRN chapter. In their first week of operation, FRN at Brown donated more than 200 pounds of food to organizations in Rhode Island helping to feed the hungry. Second, our UMD and Brown chapters joined forces with two existing food recovery programs, Bare Abundance at UC Berkeley and Food Rescue at Pomona College. We merged our organizations together to co-found the national Food Recovery Network movement. Our national leadership team is an all-start cast of leaders from each of our four chapters.
We recently filed for our 501(c)(3) status in pursuit of a vision of jumpstarting FRN chapters at colleges all across America. In our first year, our four chapters recovered 50,000 meals valued at more than $250,000, and we have been coaching students at about 20 colleges to start new chapters. Our market research has found that 75 percent of America’s 3,000 colleges don’t have any food recovery program in place, amounting to approximately 22 million meals of good food wasted each year. Food waste on college campuses is part of a larger paradox: every year, 68 billion pounds of food goes to waste in America, while one in four American children are at risk of hunger. Five years from now, we hope to have hundreds of Food Recovery Network chapters donating millions of pounds of food each year. Our ultimate goal is zero food waste on college campuses.
Our passion for entrepreneurship and social change has brought us some huge early victories. In April, we won the $5,000 grand prize in UMD’s Kevin Bacon Do Good Challenge and a couple weeks ago we won the $15,000 national grand prize in the Banking on Youth Competition sponsored by Ashoka and the Consumer Bankers Association. This funding and publicity has been a tremendous catalyst for FRN’s growth.
Donating food that would be going to waste is a no-brainer.
Our team is determined to realize our vision of empowering student across the nation with the resources and inspiration to start new programs. We would like to invite you to join us. For students interested in starting a new chapter, we can provide you with general guidance, small grants, a website, and even a letter written from our Director of Dining Services addressed to yours laying out the benefits and encouraging him/her to start an FRN.
To learn more about joining the movement, email us at [email protected] or visit www.foodrecoverynetwork.org.