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In 2011 Ben Simon launched The Food Recovery Network at the University of Maryland. The goal was simple: intercept as much leftover food from his college campus’s cafeteria as possible and get it to those in need. Within months, the network grew to include dozens of chapters at colleges across the country. More than 320,000 pounds of recovered food later, Simon is launching his most ambitious initiative to date — Food Recovery Certified.
Any food provider in the country can apply to be Food Recovery Certified as long as they donate their leftovers at least once a month. Cara Mayo, Food Recovery Certified’s program manager, works with local nonprofits to verify the donations. She says she hopes becoming certified will become a national trend. “Consumers want there businesses to be associated with an environmental or social cause. They want the effects of it to be felt in their home and in their community.”

Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Ben Simon, founder of The Food Recovery Network, has become a NationSwell Council member.

Food Cowboy: Teaching Truck Drivers ‘Nothing Goes to Waste’

It’s 2:30 on a recent Monday morning in Washington, D.C., and most of the city is still and dark. But near the intersection of New York and Florida Avenues in the northeast area known as Brookland, there is a flurry of activity at the loading dock outside S.W. Produce Inc., a small wholesaler. There, underneath bright-yellow fluorescent lights, truck after truck backs up to the concrete dock to unload crates filled with squash, cabbage, oranges and other produce, after making the journey from places as far away as Florida, Georgia or the Carolinas.
Jerry Pence, a thin, bearded trucker from Tennessee who seems so awake it could be 2:30 p.m., arrives with eight boxes of bruised zucchini that had spilled into the truck bed, all immediately rejected by the buyer. Pence must head to his next stop with an empty truck to make a pickup. “They’re good squash. If you want ’em you can have ’em!” Pence says to the folks at the dock. But they didn’t order zucchini and they have no use for them, so those eight boxes eventually make their way to the giant metal dumpsters that sit just next to the loading dock. “If there are hungry people who want these squash, I’d be happy to give them to ’em,” Pence says.
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That’s exactly what Roger Gordon, co-founder of Food Cowboy, aims to do. Gordon was at the loading dock that early morning to build relationships with the truck drivers and to persuade them and their employers to join his venture. His one-year-old startup, Food Cowboy, systematically connects truckers to food banks with the mantra that “Nothing Goes to Waste.”
“We’re very picky eaters,” Gordon says. “Retailers won’t even try to sell anything that doesn’t look just right.” Distributors often don’t have time to find a home for perishable food that stores won’t accept, he goes on to explain, and so much of it is thrown out — nearly 36 million tons, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Food Cowboy’s goal is to redirect it to the hungry.
Gordon, 46, started the organization with the help of his brother, Richard, a truck driver who’d grown all too accustomed to hauling food that was perfectly edible, though not aesthetically pleasing, to dumpsters or landfills.
Richard explains that he and Roger started talking about Food Cowboy “after I had to dump 20,000 pounds of organic green beans.” The refrigeration unit in his truck had broken, and the temperature had risen slightly before he could get it fixed. He estimates that the green beans lost only half a day of shelf life in that time, but the customer still rejected the entire shipment. “Roger and I spent a lot of time trying to donate the load, but there wasn’t anywhere close by that could accept all that food,” he says. “If we had a way of reaching all the food banks faster, we might have been more successful.”
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While there are other organizations working to curtail food waste like CropMobsters, Food Recovery Network and City Harvest, the brothers found that there was no group working directly with truck drivers to help at this level of the food-supply chain. The brothers felt they could offer the food banks a good business opportunity. Food Cowboy charges food banks a 10-cent routing service fee per pound of produce — considerably less than the 67 cents a pound that food banks would normally pay on average to buy fresh vegetables wholesale, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
But getting the food from truckers to food banks proved far from easy. “The challenge is that food banks operate Monday through Friday, 9 to 5. The rest of the food industry operates 24/7,” Gordon says. Food Cowboy has to persuade food banks to open up for those 2:30 a.m. drop-offs, and then has to find places with the manpower — and sometimes forklifts — to handle the massive loads that come off of trailer trucks.
And then there is the problem of persuading the food companies to allow the donation of rejected shipments in the first place. After all, there is the potential for lawsuits if the food makes someone sick. But Food Cowboy has found success relying on the food banks’ own quality-control measures as well as Good Samaritan laws, which protect them in the unlikely event that the food is contaminated.
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Gordon and his small staff of four — who work out of his D.C. row house — have spent the last year developing contacts at food banks across the country and building a database of places where they can direct truckers. They include Capital Area Food Bank, the largest food bank in the D.C. area. In 2012, Gordon learned through one of his brother’s connections that a shipment of 900 pounds of eggplant had recently been rejected because the vegetables, though perfectly edible, had been deemed too round and too dark to be marketable. They were destined for the dumps. Gordon was able to save the eggplants and redirect them to Capital Area Food Bank, where they were distributed to the nearly half a million people the food bank serves in the region.
Food Cowboy also brokers relationships on a smaller scale, for which they do not charge a transaction fee. Gordon introduced DC Central Kitchen, a local soup kitchen, to Mexican Fruits, a produce shop only about a five-minute drive from the soup kitchen. DC Central Kitchen can call Mexican Fruits to see if they have any produce that’s still good, but getting too old to sell. If so, they pick up the food, which Mexican Fruits donates, and serve it to hungry Washingtonians. This relationship has resulted in several pickups of food that would otherwise have gone to waste.
Amy Bachman, a manager at DC Central Kitchen, notes how helpful this relationship has been. “Food Cowboy connected us with a food source we didn’t have before,” Bachman says. “We probably wouldn’t have known about Mexican Fruits without them.”
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Gordon and his team currently field more than 20 calls each month from truckers across the country, and have helped folks in states as far away as California and North Dakota. Usually they pair truckers individually with food banks. But recently Food Cowboy has begun to expand its operation by creating an online system that allows truckers to find open food banks along their routes that will accept their edible rejected shipments. “We’re trying to make the whole process as efficient as possible,” Gordon says.
They’ve also started a Twitter campaign called “The Great Food Roundup,” with an associated app, which allows people to notify Food Cowboy anytime they see wasted food that could be redistributed. “The goal is to crowdsource a food-waste map of the United States,” Gordon says. “It will give people like Amy a much more robust map of donors they can work with.”
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How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?

When a college dining hall is emptied and the students have had their fill, the kitchen staff has one more group to feed: the dumpsters. The day at most college campuses nationwide ends with perfectly edible food being chucked into garbage trucks, which roll the food along streets filled with the homeless and the hungry en route to a local landfill.
But on this crisp September evening, at the University of Maryland’s 251 North dining hall, things were different.
After the meal, the dining hall staff began placing stainless-steel trays filled with unused food on an island countertop near the end of a spacious industrial kitchen. One by one, steaming trays were stacked on top of the other as several college students snapped on latex gloves and discussed their game plan.
Their objective was simple, really: to intercept the food before it’s thrown away and deliver it to hungry people in need. That’s the ongoing mission of the ever-expanding Food Recovery Network, which was founded on Maryland’s campus in September 2011 by Ben Simon, the nonprofit’s executive director.
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Simon and seven student volunteers readied multiple plastic containers and scooped food into the bins. Fried chicken, macaroni and cheese, spice-crusted tilapia, tomato and basil Caprese, pepperoni pizza, whole wheat penne, ciabatta rolls and chocolate cake were among the items they intended to deliver to a nearby church.
Then came the bacon. Everyone stopped. Simon, 23, darted toward the 1.6-pound tub of saturated fat and plunged his hands into the glistening mass of meat.
“This is just amazing,” said Simon, a vegetarian. “I’ve never seen this much bacon.”
He posed for a picture. The bacon grease faintly reflected the hairs of his perfectly manicured black beard and thick-rimmed Lacoste glasses. Once he was done swooning over the strips, the student volunteers loaded the dining hall’s food into the trunk of a silver Toyota Corolla and drove away.
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The type of food they packed, bacon included, is thrown out at 75 percent of college campuses across the United States. That’s roughly 22 million meals per year, trashed. Overall, Americans waste 36 million tons of food annually according to the Environmental Protection Agency, which leads to $165 billion in wasted costs and massive amounts of methane being released into the atmosphere. But since the founding of the Food Recovery Network at the University of Maryland and its initial teaming with Brown University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Pomona College in January 2012, the organization has expanded to 49 campuses nationwide. Simon’s short-term goal is to open chapters at 75 campuses by the end of the 2014 school year, all propelled by the seemingly commonsense mission of mobilizing students to salvage unused food and give it to local residents in need.
“We’re feeding someone,” says Allie Daniere, a sophomore at Maryland who went on her first recovery in September. “That is essential for life.”
Simon and the Alpha Phi Omega volunteers (one of many groups that mobilize volunteers at Maryland’s campus) delivered 126.4 pounds of food in 39 minutes to the Christian Life Center, a nondenominational church in Riverdale, Md., during their mission. They left their haul with 59-year-old Eric Thomas, a worker there, who grinned and vigorously shook Simon’s hand as the food containers were stacked onto a wooden table. Various Maryland students repeated the process two days later — chapters are required to average at least one recovery per week and vary their deliveries from shelter to shelter — while also salvaging meals from home football and basketball games.
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Simon, who was named one of 2012’s Top 10 social entrepreneurs by ABC News and Univision, has launched a charitable effort throughout the country that may seem noble, even heroic, for anyone, let alone a college student. But Simon didn’t always see a future in social entrepreneurialism. In fact, there was a time when Simon, the founder of an organization that has helped recover more than 240,963 pounds of food as of January 2014, couldn’t open doors, couldn’t dress himself.
As a junior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Md., Simon was poised to become the football team’s starting quarterback. He worked out every day that summer of 2007 and bulked up to 195 pounds.
When Simon was at the peak of his athleticism, he began to experience recurring pain shooting through his chest, shoulder, biceps and back. He was forced to quit. The multiple tendonitis coursing through his upper body reached its height during his sophomore year at Maryland. Simon still attends physical therapy for two hours every day to combat the pain.
“This injury has been a blessing in disguise,” Simon says. “It’s taught me discipline and rigor. It’s taught me gratefulness.”
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It also taught him about the world of social justice. Moping around Blair High’s hallways after stepping away from football, Simon was invited to attend a meeting of an organization called Students for Global Responsibility. There, he learned about the genocide in Darfur in Sudan; his priorities changed drastically.
“I spent most of my time before that hanging out and having fun, chasing girls and playing football,” Simon says. “I refocused all of my energy to try and make the world a better place. It was my way of turning a negative into a positive.”
Also during Simon’s junior year of high school his father, Vic, welcomed a homeless man into their Silver Spring abode. James, one of Vic’s tennis partners at a local public court, lived with the Simons for two years. He worked the night shift at Safeway and didn’t have health care, but helped Simon gain a better understanding of his priorities, of the world.
“It gave me a special glimpse at what it’s like to be poor and to not have your own place to stay,” Simon says. “To personally become a very close friend of someone like that was transformative.”
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As established as the Food Recovery Network has become — springboarding off of 2012’s grand prize victories in the Do Good Challenge and Banking on Youth Competition, contests that reward standout innovators, philanthropists and change-makers — the desire to expand is evident. Simon believes food recovery will one day become the norm, not the exception, in the U.S.
Currently stationed in an eclectic communal office on Maryland’s campus called the Startup Shell, Food Recovery Network’s staff is working to start a certification program, open a consulting line of business that empowers other organizations to eliminate food waste and ultimately house chapters at 1,000 colleges by May 2018, recovering 10 million pounds of food in the process.
Thomas and the Christian Life Center were simply thankful for the 126.4 pounds they received that night in September.
“We’ve been able to reach out to a lot of people because of this food,” Thomas says. “And that’s what it’s all about — just knowing that you’ve been able to touch somebody, to help somebody who’s in need.”
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Ben Simon, founder of The Food Recovery Network, has become a NationSwell Council member.
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