6 Ways to Donate to a Food Pantry and Reduce Food Waste

When almost 40% of our food supply ends up in the trash, are we surprised that far too many people in our communities go hungry? Or that we’re destroying our land and making it unable to produce enough food to feed all who live on it? One of the easiest steps in eliminating hunger is diverting perfectly good food from the waste stream and ensuring it ends up on our dining tables.

Imagine if every time you went to the grocery store, you purchased five bags of groceries and left two bags on the sidewalk as you walked into your house. Maybe you forgot about one. Maybe you decided the contents of the second weren’t pretty enough to be eaten, despite being perfectly nutritious and wholesome. Maybe one piece of produce was bad, so you threw out the whole bag, just for simplicity.

It might sound asinine, but it’s essentially the reality of food production cycles in our country. Oftentimes, we toss food in the trash because it doesn’t look pretty, isn’t packaged properly, has a misleading “Best Buy” date, or for a variety of other reasons, even though the food is nutritious and valuable. According to ReFED, a national nonprofit dedicated to ending food loss and waste by advancing data-driven solutions, we produced 63 million tons of surplus food in 2024 alone. Furthermore, more than 25% of the food produced in the United States goes to waste.

Take a breath and think about that. That’s just crazy! It’s so wasteful and hard to bear, especially when we consider the millions of people (1 in 7 in the United States alone) who endure food insecurity!

Where Do We Waste Food?

There are numerous disposal points for our food as it moves through the food supply chain from cradle to grave (a common term in sustainability and ecological life-cycle discussions). We see food waste on farms, during travel, in grocery stores, in restaurants, and in our own kitchens.

Food Left To Rot on Farms

Some food is left to rot in the fields (even though it’s perfectly safe to eat) because low sale prices make it unprofitable to harvest. In other words, the labor to collect and distribute the food costs more than farmers will earn for the products. Sometimes, there is insufficient labor to harvest the food.

On a side note, these circumstances should give us pause about how we treat and pay farm workers and how we pay farmers for the food they produce. We’re fine to throw away ugly produce, precisely because we don’t pay farmers and workers enough to produce it and make it worth our time and effort to consume responsibly.

Food is Too Ugly

Some things make it out of the field for packaging but don’t leave the facility because they don’t meet the aesthetic standards of our grocery stores and restaurants, standards inherently driven by consumer demand. We’ve learned to reject produce for simple beauty imperfections.

“Ugly produce” companies are helping bridge the gap in this space, ensuring that produce reaches consumers willing to eat it despite unreasonable grocery store standards. Many edible foods that are considered inferior or “imperfect” are perfectly safe for human consumption!

Food Waste During Transportation

We also lose food during transportation – between farms and warehouses, processing plants, stores, and restaurants. Food needs to be properly stored; without proper cooling or storage, it can easily spoil. Some food travels thousands of miles around the world before it reaches us, creating many opportunities for it to spoil during transit.

Food Waste at Grocery Stores and Restaurants

Another portion of food is lost in grocery stores and restaurants. Grocery stores throw away abundant amounts of food. They overstock shelves to make them look full, even late into the evening when they know they won’t sell things. At night’s end, the excess is trashed.

Packaged items are thrown out before their expiration dates, many of which are “best buy” dates, not dates when food is no longer edible. The food is still perfectly good to eat.

Restaurants serve gigantic portions that we don’t eat, and then they throw away much of the excess.

Various food rescue programs and similar organizations have been working to get more food from commercial sources to food pantries, where it can be used. Some of this happens at scale, while other organizations rely on individual volunteers to pick up and package food for delivery to food cupboards.

Food Waste at Home

After arriving home, consumers continue to waste even more food. We make ambitious plans to cook healthy dinners every night, and the days get away from us. Food hides out in the back of the fridge and is forgotten. We serve larger portions to fill ever-growing plates, and we don’t eat everything we serve. For so many reasons, we buy far more food than we end up eating, and the remnants and leftovers rot until they end up in our trash cans, and ultimately our landfills.

6 Ways to Donate to a Food Pantry and Reduce Food Waste

While some food waste is inevitable, there are many steps we can take to reduce it and, more importantly, help more of our food reach local food banks, where it can fill the hungry stomachs of our neighbors in need.

Donate Time: Gleaning for Good

Have you ever heard of gleaning? Until I started learning more about food waste, I was not familiar with the practice. It dates back a long time, but we can still do more of it today. Gleaning is the practice of returning to farm fields to collect the remaining harvest left behind by farmers. For the reasons I mentioned above, farmers don’t gather everything that grows in their fields.

Many food banks offer volunteering opportunities to glean for the local food bank. Some food banks offer opportunities through their own organizations, while others partner with third-party non-profit organizations or groups that organize the gleaning adventures. Family and friends can get together for a day out in the fields to harvest produce from local farms that hasn’t been harvested yet. Then the produce is donated to food banks to help fill their shelves with much-needed, wholesome food.

A couple of weeks ago, I volunteered with my local food pantry to pick pears from a local, private orchard. The property owner couldn’t pick all the pears herself. We stopped by for a couple of hours to pick ripe pears off the branches as well as gather up many perfectly good pears that had fallen to the ground.

With just a few sets of hands, we picked several containers of pears that the food pantry offered to their patrons. The pantry even partnered with a local bakery to use some of the pears in pear cardamom pies, which were then sold to the public to benefit the food pantry. It was a great way to make the most of a food resource that would otherwise have gone to waste without a little community intervention.

Donate Time: Get Involved With a Food Recovery Organization

Non-profit organizations around the country, some independent and some tied directly to local food banks, work to recover food that would otherwise end up in the trash. This food primarily comes from grocery stores, food distribution companies, and other food-industry businesses with excess supply.

The excess may result from a myriad of reasons. As I mentioned above, grocery stores typically keep a full stock on their shelves because the abundant appearance is more aesthetically pleasing. However, the extra items on the shelf don’t always have a home by the end of the night, so food banks can take perfectly healthy, wholesome stock to provide to their patrons.

Grocery stores and other food distributors also adhere to ‘sell by’, ‘best by’, and expiration dates printed by manufacturers. These dates indicate when the manufacturer believes the food will be in its best condition, not the expiration date, when the food is no longer edible. Without food recovery services, much of this food is tossed into the trash, even though it’s perfectly suitable for people to eat.

In both situations and many others, food recovery organizations work with grocery stores and other food retailers to transport the food to food banks. MealConnect, part of Feeding America, is one organization that helps connect food distributors with local food pantries and non-profits to facilitate partnerships.

There are many local organizations, like Philly Food Rescue, Sharing Excess, and Cocoa Packs, in my area that do similar work. You can find organizations like this in your area by searching online for terms like “Food Rescue Near Me.”

Though not as widely understood as one might hope, the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act protects food distributors who act in good faith from liability arising from food donations. Hopefully, as this regulation is more widely upheld, food distributors will become more comfortable donating more food.

If you have a business that could donate food, look for food rescue organizations in your area to learn how to join their network and connect with local food pantries. Even if you don’t own a food-distribution business, we can all get involved in local food recovery efforts to help coordinate and execute the transportation of food to feed our hungry neighbors. Grab a friend and drive around town together, bringing good food to great people and families who need it most.

Donate Time: Coordinate a Food Rescue Program at School

Many schools are beginning to implement sustainability committees that help create a variety of programs and initiatives that make the school more eco-conscious. I’ve seen parents and students create food-sharing programs in their lunchrooms (where they leave unopened food for classmates to eat if they do not want it). Many schools are starting composting programs to reduce food waste.

If it’s an option at your school, consider working with the administration and food services teams to get excess food to the local food pantry. Not all food is suitable for passing along to the pantry, but even if some of it reaches hungry neighbors instead of ending up in the trash, that’s a win!

It’s also a great way to bring conversations and awareness about food insecurity in students’ own communities to light. Such a program may even pair well with the student workbook about Discussing Hunger a friend and I made through Raising Global Kidizens, an organization we run that makes educational resources for young learners developed around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

Related Reading: How to Start a Sustainability Committee at Your Child’s School: A Step-by-Step Guide + FREE Workbook

Donate Excess Food: Donate From Your Home or Community Garden

You may not grow food at the scale of donations from grocery stores or restaurants, but food pantries are happy to take excess produce from your home or community garden when it is available. Over the last month, I’ve had a ton of extra cherry tomatoes and yellow Peru peppers that my family won’t eat, so I dropped them off at the food cupboard in my community.

If you have a large space for growing nutritious food and have the time to grow excess, you could even ask the food pantry in advance what types of fresh produce are popular among their patrons and then grow what people like. You’ll have to work with the climate, of course, but there are certain types of produce that last longer or are in higher demand at various community food pantries.

Donate Time: Host a Local Food Drive or Fundraiser

If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, host a local food drive or fundraiser to support your food bank. If you’re not sure where to find your local food bank, Feeding America has a directory of all its partners, a great place to start. You could also just Google “food pantries near me” and reach out to them directly to learn more about their needs.

Encourage your family and friends to come together to raise money or collect food for your local food bank. Be sure to reach out to your food bank to find out what they need; sometimes, food banks receive too much of certain types of food and not enough of others.

Donate Money: Give to a Food Bank or Pantry

You may not have time to volunteer or host a food drive. Instead, consider making a regular donation to a food pantry or food cupboard in your local area. Many people rely on these services to feed their families.

For those of us not experiencing food insecurity, I think it’s tough to imagine what it would really feel like. I think it’s even harder to understand how pervasive hunger is in a person’s life. Sometimes people joke about being “hangry,” but it’s humbling to imagine that this is the “norm” for many people in our country.

It breaks my heart to think about a child trying to learn in school with a grumbling stomach distracting from the task at hand. As a parent, I can definitely understand how tough it must be not to be able to provide your child with three meals a day.

Even with a small donation, we can help bring more food to the table for families in our communities who cannot fill their cabinets with wholesome food.

Other Considerations to Help Your Local Food Cupboard

Learn More About What Is Safe To Eat

There’s a lot of confusion swirling around our communities about which foods are safe to eat and which should be thrown out. All too often, we throw out food long before it’s gone bad or because it doesn’t look just right.

Have you ever thrown out a whole apple just because it had a blemish? Would you buy the pineapple at the grocery store with the crooked top? Truth be told, most of us probably don’t even know that tons of produce are “imperfect” because that produce never makes it to the grocery store shelves (even though there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it).

Philabundance, the central food bank in Philadelphia, offers guidelines for food pantries and donors to help them understand what can and cannot be donated. From the rules, you can see that Best Buy and Sell By dates are not the proper guidelines for when to throw away food. In fact, they even accept a lot of food after its expiration dates. Many food items are safe to eat and have a longer shelf life than that shown on the package.

Be An Advocate In Your Community

Word of mouth is powerful. Most people have no idea how much food goes to waste. And why would they? Our food production is so far removed from the daily lives of most people who eat it that it’s tough to expect everyone to understand how it gets from farm to table. We waste food, in part, because we lack awareness of how much is piling up and how much impact it could have if diverted to worthy causes.

As you learn more about just how much food waste is piling up in our landfills and leaving families in our communities hungry, spread the word. Tell others, kindly, about the small steps they can take to be advocates for more efficient and effective food distribution in our country. You never know how much of an impact a few casual conversations can have as they travel through the grapevine.

Don’t be afraid to invite friends to glean together or to support a local food recovery organization. Sometimes, just a little nudge goes a long way.

Some Change But Not All Change Requires Money

After graduating from college, my first large (to me) charitable contribution was a donation to my local food bank. I know there are so many worthy organizations serving our communities, but there’s something about the simplicity of food that really resonates with me. It’s so basic to our well-being and something we can all understand in everyday language. We all know what it feels like to be hungry, some of us with more consistency than others, unfortunately.

The more I learn about our food cycle and all the pitfalls and dumping points along the way, the more I believe the “fixes” for hunger aren’t just about more food. It starts with creating systems that make better use of the food we already have, and we all play a part in limiting the waste that we create.

Changing the systems we have in place costs money. Whether we’re paying to transport food from the grocery store to the food bank and safely store it at the food bank, building technology to more efficiently connect lost food with hungry stomachs, or redesigning the whole darn system to make it economical for all food to make it to our tables (instead of being left in the fields or tossed in the trash), it’s important that our food-related organizations have funding to support their efforts. 

We can also make a difference regardless of the financial resources available. We can limit the waste that we produce. We can buy the “ugly” produce that might otherwise be tossed in the trash. We can volunteer at our local food bank or with a local food recovery organization. And we can speak up to remind others that 25% of our food ends up in landfills. That’s just not sustainable or beneficial to anyone.

What will you do today to help feed hungry neighbors in your community?

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