Sharing local produce with communities in need

Food insecurity and access to basic needs

Expand existing project, program, or initiative (expanding and continuing ongoing, successful work)

Amid rising food prices and cuts to nutritional benefits programs, USC Dornsife reports indicate that 30% of Los Angeles households (over one million households) experience food insecurity. Individuals and families that lack access to healthy foods increasingly turn to cheap, convenient, and highly processed alternatives that exacerbate diet-related diseases, or skip meals entirely. At the same time, millions of metric tons of perfectly edible fruits and vegetables end up in landfills each year, depriving our communities of high-quality, nutritious foods, wasting precious resources, and emitting harmful greenhouse gases. Food Forward offers a simple yet powerful solution to these challenges, leveraging a complex yet nimble logistics operation to divert millions of pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables from the waste stream to underserved communities experiencing food insecurity across Los Angeles County.

Food Forward operates three award-winning food recovery programs: two volunteer-powered Community Programs (Backyard Harvest and Farmers Market Recovery) and the staff-driven Wholesale Recovery Program, which operates in partnership with the larger fresh foods industry. The flagship Backyard Harvest program provides fruit to partner organizations from harvests led by volunteers on hundreds of fruit tree properties. The Farmers Market Recovery program is a market-endorsed donation system for farmers and vendors wanting to help fight hunger with their unsold produce; it currently recovers from 17 markets. Food Forward’s large-scale Wholesale Recovery Program recovers surplus produce donated by the pallet- and truckload from wholesale produce distributors and growers at our warehouse. The produce recovered by Food Forward is delivered to 260 hunger relief partner organizations across nearly 300 distribution sites annually that provide the produce directly to their community members free of charge; some of those partners also distribute to additional affiliates or other local direct service organizations that serve more people. With the generous support of LA2050, Food Forward will grow the volume of produce recovered and distributed to its hunger relief partners to 90 million pounds over the next year, meeting the critical need for fresh produce while demonstrating the power of our produce recovery model to address food insecurity and food loss and waste at scale.

Food Forward’s programs divert millions of pounds of perfectly edible surplus fruits and vegetables from landfills to Angelenos who lack reliable access to fresh, whole foods, improving health equity. Consistent produce donations from Food Forward also enables our partners across the social services sector to focus resources on providing additional wraparound services, including health care, job and housing searches, child care, and rehabilitation services. In this way, our work both meets immediate nutritional needs while supporting the long-term success of the entire social safety net serving underserved communities across the region.
Beyond those served directly by our food distribution work, Food Forward also inspires shared ownership in our vision for a more equitable and resilient food system amongst the hundreds of produce donors, thousands of volunteers, and members of the general public that engage with our programs each year.

Food Forward’s primary measures of impact include the number of pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables recovered and distributed and the number of partner organizations served by that food. Secondarily, Food Forward calculates the metric tons of CO2 equivalent prevented by our food recovery, the social impact value of that donated produce, the number of volunteer-led harvests, the number of farmers markets gleaned, total produce donors, and efficiency in the operational cost to recover and distribute one pound of produce. Staff tracks each donation of wholesale produce using customized produce tracking and inventory software called Fusionware. Backyard Harvest and Farmers Market Recovery produce donations and volunteer shifts are tracked using the organization’s custom-built volunteer management and produce donation software, CITRA. For all programs, staff track output results continuously and work with leadership staff to validate these results to goals monthly.