Giving Compass' Take:

• City Harvest is one of many food banks that is distributing fresh produce through the Feeding America network, a parent organization that is leading the effort to reduce food waste while getting fresh produce to food banks. 

• What are the challenges for food banks to sustain this model? 

• Read more about food waste innovations spearheaded by the New York Department of Sanitation. 

Despite the ubiquity of canned food drives, particularly around the holidays, the canned items, says Max Hoffman, City Harvest’s food sourcing manager, are somewhat of an anomaly in the LIC warehouse: Over 50% of the food that City Harvest distributes is fresh produce. That makes the New York City nonprofit somewhat of an anomaly–with a few notable exceptions, mainly in California, produce makes up less than 10%of standard food bank inventory.

Not only are perishable foods, and produce in particular, more nutritious, but they also constitute a huge portion of food waste in America.

Feeding America, the nation’s largest hunger-relief organization (its annual budget nears $30 million), wants to make City Harvest’s produce parity the norm for food banks, rather than the exception. In the past year and a half, the nonprofit and parent organization of a network of 200 food banks (of which City Harvest is a part) launched an effort to mitigate food waste and close the nutrition gap by developing a new system to source excess produce and distribute it to its food banks across the country.

Feeding America’s new strategy has entailed building out regional produce cooperatives to which farmers could bring their surplus crops, essentially creating a physical link between growers and the hunger-relief nonprofit. While some food banks have connections with local growers, for the majority of their history, food banks have not been set up to accommodate and move fresh food. Changing that will reduce waste and ensure that hungry people are fed not with empty, unhealthy calories, but with fresh, nutritious food.

Read the full article on fresh produce at food banks by Eillie Anzilotti FastCompany