Feeding Richmond: How community fridges tackle food insecurity

FoodCommune aims to reduce food waste by rescuing food before it ends up in landfills, redistributing about 6,000 pounds of food per week. FoodCommune gathers food from farmer’s markets, grocery stores, restaurants and other sources, redistributing enough to feed about 300 people each week.

We Don’t Waste serves more than 100 hunger relief organizations across the city and has saved and redistributed 220 million servings of food to date. The team of staff and volunteers who recover and distribute food to the community has not only helped prevent food waste, but also greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental consequences, all while feeding locals in need.

Community fridges, like The Friendly Fridge, popped up during the pandemic as a way to get food to people in need, as the pandemic highlighted nationwide food insecurity issues. The fridges survive on donations from community members, other organizations and local restaurants and grocery stores. It’s estimated that about 250 people will grab something from The Friendly Fridge each day.

The UGA Garden works with Trader Joe’s to gather viable produce the grocery chain gets rid of each Sunday. Student workers go through the food each week, compost what has gone bad, and use the rest to make meals for those in need. The organizations has gathered over 330,000 pounds of food so far and deliver over 700 meals per month.

Through volunteers and partnerships with other local organizations, the Sisters of St. Joseph Neighborhood Center distributes a month’s worth of food to families in need for free, as a large portion of the population is undocumented, unemployed, or otherwise ineligible for government assistance. The Center also provides services such as English language classes, a clothes closet, a diaper bank and assistance getting a driver’s license.

The Westside Food Bank has been distributing food to community members in need across the city since 1981. Today, they provide nutritious food and fresh produce to 153,000 people facing food insecurity.

The volunteer initiative Foodsharing is helping reduce food waste in Germany by collecting donated goods from restaurants, grocery stores, and other food businesses and distributing them to anyone interested. The food is given away through communication channels like WhatsApp groups or publicly accessible places like community fridges, and you do not need to meet any qualifications to get it.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic making access to groceries more difficult, The Walker River Paiute Tribe created a food pantry to support members of the tribe and local farmers. The food pantry has since become the largest in the state, by volume of distributed food, having distributed about 6,500 bags of food to over 355 households.

In 2014, the community organization Asociación Puertorriqueños en Marcha piloted a community-based Food Buying Club in Philadelphia. This initiative allowed local residents to buy food in bulk at wholesale prices. The goal was to strengthen food security and combat the lack of affordable and nutritious food in their neighborhood. Despite distributing over 62,000 pounds of fresh produce, the program shut down due to financial reasons. Now, after forming an advisory council and working on their business strategy with others in the community, the club is reopening and is looking to expand across the city.

When the economy came to a sudden halt with the onset of a global pandemic, farmers were left with produce meant for the restaurant industry while families who lost incomes struggled to put food on their tables. For one good samaritan “it was just a matter of connecting the dots.” George Ahearn's idea to crowdsource transportation from farms to food banks led to the creation of EastWest Food Rescue, a nonprofit that has delivered 2.4 million pounds of crops to 160 food banks.