Fresh Food Delivered with Dignity to Fire-Impacted Communities

Wildfire relief

County of Los Angeles (select only if your project has a countywide benefit)

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

According to 2024 USC data, over 25% of Los Angeles County households experience food and nutrition insecurity each day. The 2025 wildfires are exacerbating this need, driving thousands of residents who lost homes and livelihoods to seek emergency food assistance. Many community-based hunger relief providers cannot consistently source fresh, nutrient-dense fruits and vegetables for the communities they serve. At the same time, with its deep agricultural roots and access to some of the nation’s largest ports and wholesale produce markets, Los Angeles is a hub for the nation’s fresh produce industry. But market inefficiencies and inbuilt surplus mean that hundreds of millions of pounds of perfectly good produce are sent to landfills each year. Recovering and distributing this surplus produce that would otherwise go to waste is a proven, scalable, and sustainable solution that can support fire-impacted communities with long-term access to fresh, healthy foods.

Food Forward’s Wholesale Recovery Program diverts truckloads of donated surplus produce each day to a network of hunger relief partners to share with communities experiencing food and nutrition insecurity across Los Angeles County, free of charge. When the wildfires began in January, the program’s existing scale enabled an immediate pivot to emergency response: staff quickly sourced additional fruit and vegetable donations from growers and shippers across the fresh foods industry, supported several city-wide distribution events, and began evaluating how best to support our partners and their communities. Within weeks, the Wholesale Recovery Program created new or expanded existing distribution partnerships with five community-based organizations, delivering 40,000 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables weekly to fire-impacted communities while maintaining regularly scheduled distributions to the rest of our partner network.
This grant will enable the Wholesale Recovery Program to maintain this expanded service over the next year, helping our team recover and distribute at least 1.6 million pounds of surplus fruits and vegetables to hunger relief partners supporting communities through long-term wildfire recovery—enough produce to meet the recommended daily servings for 4,900 people every day. Overall, in 2025, Food Forward will distribute 100 million pounds of produce to over 250 partner organizations throughout Los Angeles, Southern California, and the surrounding region.

For individuals and families impacted by the wildfires, as well as for all those we and our hunger relief partners serve, Food Forward improves access to fresh, healthy foods that communities may not otherwise be able to afford. Consistent produce donations from Food Forward also enable our diverse network of hunger relief partners to shift resources to meet other wraparound community needs: permanent housing and employment, child and health care, and rehabilitation. In this way, our food distribution work both provides immediate relief to individuals and families experiencing food insecurity and helps our partners to more substantively support the long-term recovery of their service communities. The success of our project will reinforce how the existing abundance in our local food supply and networks of community-based partners can be leveraged to build a more resilient food system that ensures all Angelenos have consistent access to nutrient-dense food.