Less food waste. More family meals.: Encouraging shared mealtime by redirecting surplus prepared food as take-home dinners to families with children.

Commodities

Practices

• Sustainable Communities: food loss and waste recovery/reduction

After source reduction, redirecting surplus food to feed people is the highest priority action for preventing and diverting food waste.  Among the types of food to be redirected, good-to-eat prepared food is the most valuable because of the value of the raw ingredients as well as the additional labor and other resources involved in the preparation.  Despite the high value of prepared food, ReFED data indicates that only 0.75% of surplus prepared food from the food service sector was donated in 2022.  Redirecting surplus prepared food as free, take-home family meals provides a valuable benefit to food insecure families, in terms of both the nutritional value of the food and the additional time and money parents and caregivers gain from not having to shop for and prepare a meal.  

Funding for the Pete’s Garden SARE Community Foods Project would be used to demonstrate the viability and growth potential of a program to redirect surplus prepared food as free take-home family dinners to food insecure families.  Funding will support the creation and distribution of a “playbook” for how organizations in other cities/regions can start their own family meal distribution program by recovering and redirecting surplus prepared food.  In completing this project, we will validate ReFED data on the amount of prepared food currently being donated in the Kansas City market and estimate the total amount of surplus prepared food that is good-to-eat and donatable in our market.   In completing this project, we will also engage in outreach to inspire and enable similar research and programs in other markets.

Over the course of the 3-year grant we will:

1. Develop and implement a replicable methodology for establishing a baseline and sizing the growth opportunity for prepared food recovery in a local market; apply this methodology to the Kansas City market.
   • Interview Kansas City food pantries and community kitchens that accept prepared food donations to capture baseline date on poundage and type of food currently recovered.
   • Compare the baseline estimate we develop for Kansas City to ReFED state-level data for prepared food waste in Kansas and Missouri.
   • Interview Kansas City composters that work with food service businesses to identify businesses that may be composting good-to-eat, donatable food.
   • Interview at least 10 food service managers who do not donate to understand their concerns or impediments to prepared food donation.
   • Survey at least 100 Kansas City restaurants, caterers, and food service operations to assess current practices regarding surplus food.
   • Use interview and survey results to estimate the total amount of wasted prepared food available for donation.
2. Develop and implement a replicable plan to establish and scale-up a local program for redirecting surplus prepared food as free, take-home family meals, using Pete’s Garden as a model; develop a “playbook” to disseminate this information to other cities/regions.
   • Present the Pete’s Garden meal distribution model at the annual ReFED conference in 2026 and 2027.
   • Identify at least 2 other relevant regional or national conferences and present the Pete’s Garden meal distribution model at those conferences.
3. Build awareness and buy-in regarding food loss/waste and food recovery within the Kansas City food service sector, resulting in a 2x increase in the amount of surplus prepared food donated to feed people in the Kansas City market, from 200,000 pounds (current baseline estimate) to 400,000 pounds, over the 3-year grant period.
4. Incorporate the Pete’s Garden case study into the Kids Feeding Kids curriculum and present to 200 teachers and at least 15,000 FACS and Culinary Arts students over the 3-year grant period.
   • Use pre/post student surveys to demonstrate that student awareness of the food waste problem increased because of their participation in Kids Feeding Kids.