Feeding San Diego’s Food Rescue Program has a partnership with the world’s largest coffeehouse chain.
Since 2016, Feeding San Diego said it rescued over 3 million pounds of food from local Starbucks stores.
More than 200 stores participate in the Starbucks FoodShare program, said Feeding San Diego's Carissa Casares.
“This partnership is just such a perfect example of why we cannot let food go to waste," Casares said. "It's bad for the climate, it's detrimental to the climate. We're still in Earth month. We shouldn't be putting perfectly good edible surplus food in landfills.”
“It's proof of concept, at scale that this isn't impossible," Casares said. "Sure, there's a lot of logistics involved, but it's possible.”
So, where does that rescue food go? It goes to 11 local community organizations like the Third Avenue Charitable Organization — otherwise known as TACO.
Susan Fleming from TACO said every Wednesday is known as “Starbucks Day” and their clients line up as early as 7:00 a.m. for food.
“It sure beats watching somebody take food out of a trash can and eat it,” Fleming said, “Which is what we see on a regular basis where people are so hungry and picking food out of trash cans.”
“It reduces the cost that we have to pay out of our nonprofit budget, and it allows for us to be able to serve a higher quantity of food to a larger — increasingly larger — number of people,” Fleming said.
Because of the Starbucks FoodShare Program, TACO said it was able to provide over 200 meals to the food insecure community and were able to accommodate certain diets, too.
“The plant-based protein packs that are sent, and the plant-based sandwiches that we receive, we keep those to the side and we save those for the ones that are asking for a specific food type,” Fleming said.
Feeding San Diego said its partnership with Starbucks created a linkage between the nonprofit world and the corporate world and helped alleviate some of the pressing issues affecting community members like food insecurity.
