Who Feeds the Hungry? · Loving One Another in Our Hungry World

1:04:23 It's a place close to my heart. I was actually the admissions director at Second Presbyterian Church for about eight and a half years before I transferred over here. And so I was regularly crossing paths with all of our Trish of the Resurrection friends and so many organizations that are addressing many issues, not the least of which is food insecurity. But I've had the privilege of being at Cambys. I'm the senior director of operations over there. And my friend John over here is the one to help us with all of our volunteers. We couldn't do what we do without them. We are in the fresh food business, primarily fruits and vegetables. and our organization was birthed right at the intersection between issues looking at a lack of food access primarily healthy food access and issues of food loss or food waste and as Max Kaniger our CEO began to explore this idea and figure out what to do about it he looked at the statistics, 40% of the food that we grow here is wasted. It is thrown away. Say that one again.

1:05:28 I don't want that to be. 40% of food that we grow and prepare is thrown away. To the tune of about $119 billion. I will say that statistic is dated. And so it is probably, I don't know what it is today, but it's got to be somewhere close to that. But it is a staggering amount of food. Do you think it's getting better? I want to believe it is. It's a lagging indicator. Okay, yeah, go ahead. I think with the efforts that we are here and our friends across the nation, across the world, we are seeing things go in a positive direction. But I think we would be remiss to be too hopeful. There's a lot of work left to do. Right. So if we think about all of this food, the question then became, is all of it really bad? And the truth is, it's really not. that's actually what I spend a fair bit of my time doing is figuring out how do I keep good food out of the landfill and do something more productive with it. The other statistic we look at is food access. And the USDA defines a home within an urban setting that doesn't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables within a half mile of their residence to be located in a low-income, low-access area or more casually known as a food desert. Part of the reason I would guess has to do with transportation and distance, right? So if you're going to calculate this, you've got to allow for those who don't have cars and they're going to be walking to where they go, right? Absolutely. And so if we think about where Canby's has spent their time focusing, we're specifically targeting areas of town that are located within this low-income, low-access area. And so we're looking at if we have all of this good food and we have all of these people that need it is that what is the missing element of there? And I think you mentioned this, this distribution problem. How do we get food from where it is to where it can do the most good?

1:07:27 And so I'll give you just the briefest definition of our two big programs. And we're about to launch a couple of really interesting ones as Erica was sharing about in the food as medicine space. But our food access program, we call it healthy corner stores. And for slides, you can go back to beginning. I have a couple that I'll go through once at a time. This is a great, there you go. We work with gas stations, convenience stores, liquor stores, and coffee shops around the metro. And in those places, we install coolers and baskets where we sell fresh produce. And our goal is to target areas where a home is outside of that half mile mark. And we want people to be able to shop where they need to shop, but to always keep that fresh food on the table. And I'll give you just a real world example. We were, we spoke to one of the, our community members and they were helping us understand what their cadence is. You're right. Transportation and security is a very closely aligned issue to deal with in addition to food insecurity. Because what we're finding is that in many of these communities, it's not that people aren't shopping. It's that they aren't shopping frequently. And to shop means that I have to go catch a bus. And you might notice many of, they're scaling back quite a number of bus routes, especially on the east side of Kansas City Metro.

1:08:52 And so it could be an every two or three week excursion. And when they go, they are getting as much stuff as they possibly can to last that two or three weeks. And it's as much as they can physically carry with them on the bus. They might be getting fresh food, but that lasts as long as the food lasts. And so they're not getting a healthy diet and a regular diet of fresh healthy foods, which helps with our health, our nutrition, child development, and that consistency. Our goal is not to replace grocery stores, but to work alongside harvesters and many of our other friends, food pantries to say how can we make sure food is always available and is available as frequently as it possibly can. So we have 130 locations. We just actually pioneered into Kansas earlier this year into Wyandotte County. So we have about 30 locations in there that are scattered around the county and people can find fresh fruits and vegetables. Now what I'll tell you is we are also in the food rescue business. So the wholesalers that we work with to purchase this food and to get it into these stores, we supplement with food that we're rescuing. We know that one of our wholesalers, kind of a mid-range wholesaler in town, throws away about 12 million pounds of food a year. Food that either is deemed not fit, it's starting to go bad, or it doesn't have a long enough shelf life to make it to a grocery store. That's about 44,000 pounds of food a day that they're having to ship off. We're working with all of them. We have about seven contracts in town, seven accounts where we can rescue food, and we utilize volunteers to sort through it. About 60% of the food that we are seeing today is still good for humans to eat. And so we sort that out.

1:10:43 We give that back out to food pantries. Last year was about a million pounds of food. This year, we're looking at closer to 1.6, 1.7 million pounds of food that'll go back out to our food pantry network. And we are, that is food that was free to us with a little bit of work and free actually out to our partners. What I want to impress on you though, is that our partners are coming to us, the food pantries in town saying the need since, and I think you brought up a good statistic the last couple of months has tripled. They could use three times the amount of food because where is this snap response being supplemented? If they aren't getting it, where else are they going? They're going to the charitable networks. They're going to the food pantries. And so they are coming saying, what can you possibly give? Can we come two or three times a week to get this extra food? In addition, they are on the beat to try to figure out how we're going to make up this difference. And I can't under-emphasize the impact that SNAP is having, not just on the people to get it, but also the small businesses that we work with.

1:11:47 The more complicated this becomes, the less incentivized they are to keep and maintain that SNAP license. I have a store right now, one of our best performing stores, that just told me he is having to go back. They just had a small paperwork issue, and now he's lost his SNAP license. He was doing $300,000 a year in SNAP redemption, and now he has to wait until December to get all this paperwork done to get that back out. But people were utilizing his store to get staple ingredients, and now they can't. And where else are they going? And so it's not just that using the SNAP and keeping the SNAP is a serious issue, but also now we have this fulfillment issue as well that's becoming more and more complicated and it's starting to de-incentivize. It's worth noting, and it brings back to something Erica said earlier, that we're not just talking about a moral issue, but there's a fiscal smart dimension to it because the return on the SNAP investment is, if I understand correctly, a dollar and a half return economically for every dollar invested through the support system.

1:13:00 So we're not talking about the drag on our economy. We're talking about a driver of our economy. Very important to note. So these problems are mounting. despite the fact that these programs are part of a healthy society. I don't want to get by because one of the things I found fascinating was you're dealing with food waste and you have sources that come to you and you have a four-step process to get as close to eliminating waste in its entirety. We don't have a lot of time for you to do it, but you could do better than I. Go ahead and share with this group how you divide and conquer. So this food rescue program we have, we call it our food redirection program. And the food that comes in is all, we have a zero waste program for this food processing. The highest tiers of food, so about 60% or so of what we're processing that's good for human consumption, either we'll supplement what we sell in our stores to defray our costs and keep that cost low which if I can rabbit trail for just a second lettuce comes in 24 24 heads of iceberg lettuce in a case on Wednesday that I had to buy that at a wholesale level at 111 dollars I want you to do the math on that we haven't bought lettuce this week and this is not because of cyclospora. This isn't because of all of that. This is just the trend in how expensive food is.

1:14:34 And our commitment to keeping that cost low, to keep it competitive with Aldi, Walmart, means that we have to supplement a lot, especially on days when food is that expensive. And so we supplement some of our store stuff, about 10% of what we get. We can throw that way. About 50%, 60% or so, 55%, we give back out to food pantries. But the lower quality food, we still find a use for. We have rescue farms that we give food to that you wouldn't need it, but pigs, chickens, and cows would be happy to. So we have half a dozen or so food farms that come and pick up from us. And anything we can't save, we compost. We work with our friends at KC Can Compost. They work out of our facility, which is very convenient, and help us make sure that it goes to a productive end and ultimately gets back out to the farms to grow more food. Yeah.

1:15:28 Zero waste with that model. It all can do something productive. Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating. Can Be's has launched something. How old is the organization now? We're celebrating 10 years. 10 years. This year. We just had it. Yeah. Yeah. And in that time now, it has gained the attention outside of our state. I know Harvard Business School and others are looking. This is a model that can be replicated, exported, shared. And we can tackle those numbers of the lagging indicators of food waste. And we can deal with, I know you're involved with Food is Medicine. You're at the starting edge on that, doing the application levels to get connected to that, which allows for support and funding from the federal government to support that high-priority need. So exciting things for the future as well.

1:16:23 Absolutely. And that's really some of the exciting things we have to look forward to going into 2027. And just to frame this, we have a formula we use for access. What do we mean by access? If someone has access to food, it means they have to be close to it, say proximity, plus affordability. They have to be able to get it once they get there. And education. They have to know what to do with it when they get it. And we are a distribution company, a logistics company. So proximity, we have all of these between our healthy corner stores and our hunger relief partners, about 200 plus locations where people can get food. We're working for affordability, trying to keep costs low if you have to purchase it. Obviously, our food pantry network is able to provide that. And then education is when we work with all of the organizations here to make sure people have a way to utilize it. But in the food is medicine space, just very briefly, we have three interventions that we are working towards.

1:17:21 One is already up and running. It's a produce prescription program. So we're working with about seven of the health care partners in town, Children's Mercy, St. Luke's, KU Med. And they are funding vouchers that people who've been screened for food insecurity can utilize at Canby's locations. They can leave a doctor's office visit and stop by one of our convenience stores at home and get $10, $20 worth of produce. We've had about 200 patients, actually closer to 250 patients that have been through the process just in the last couple of years. And we're talking about taking that upward quite a bit more exponential growth there. But this next year, even before the end of the year, we're getting into medically tailored groceries. Medically tailored meals will launch next year. And this is a big topic of conversation is will insurance companies and health care providers see the value, as Erica was saying, see the value in nutrition as a benefit to treatment? and what can we do to help support that?

1:18:26 So we actually have a dietician that's on contract with us that helps look at, say, all right, this is a diabetes-approved diet. These are groceries that would be beneficial towards that treatment, medically tailored meals. Here's a menu, a two- or three-week menu that you could make, provide, and deliver to a home. And there's a lot of topics of conversations about how insurance companies can justify using benefit dollars to be able to get this into their hands.