SeaShare is excited to announce that we have been selected as a 2019 General Mills Food Recovery Champion. What does that mean? It means we were selected as one of 20 winners in North America who are working to expand food recovery programs to nourish more hungry people across the US and Canada. 

To read more about the program, and the other food recovery champions, read on:

More than $1 million awarded to organizations in the U.S. and Canada to expand surplus food recovery to nourish more people facing hunger

MINNEAPOLIS, Minnesota – General Mills announces the 20 winners of its Food Recovery Champions program that awards grants to expand surplus food recovery in the U.S. and Canada for greater social and environmental impact.

The program reflects General Mills’ belief that food waste is a major social, environmental and economic challenge that undermines population food security, contributes to climate change, unnecessarily consumes natural resources like water, and costs families, communities and businesses money.

General Mills’ Food Recovery Champions grants program aims to further strengthen and expand proven and/or highly promising nonprofit food recovery programs, enabling greater levels of impact than ever before via expanded food recovery enablement. 

The winners of the Food Recovery Champions program include: 

• 412 Food Rescue (Pittsburgh, PA)
• Adelante Development Center, Inc. (Albuquerque, NM)
• Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance (Little Rock, AR)
• Boston Area Gleaners (Waltham, MA)
• Charities Aid Foundation - Moisson Montreal (Saint-Laurent, Quebec - Canada)
• Charities Aid Foundation - Second Harvest Canada (Toronto, Ontario – Canada)
• Daily Table/Urban Food Initiative (Dorchester, MA)
• Food Finders, Inc. (Lakewood, CA)
• Food Forward (North Hollywood, CA)
• Food Rescue US Inc. (Norwalk, CT)
• Kitchens for Good (San Diego, CA)
• OneOC/Waste Not OC (Santa Ana, CA)
• One Percent to End Hunger/Chefs to End Hunger (Santa Fe Springs, CA)
• Re-Plate (Berkeley, CA)
• Rescuing Leftover Cuisine, Inc. (New York, NY)
• Rotary First Harvest (Seattle, WA)
• The SF Market (San Francisco, CA)
• SeaShare (Bainbridge Island, WA)
• Second Servings of Houston (Bellaire, TX)
• St. Francis Center (Los Angeles, CA)

While the awarded organizations reflect a wide array of operating models, from earned revenue models with paid staff to organizations powered by fleets of citizen volunteers, each grant recipient was selected based on their potential to contribute differential impact to one or more of the following targeted outcomes:

• Increased quantity of surplus food recovered and redistributed
• Increased number of people served / benefitting
• Increased efficiency of food recovery 
• Increased reliability of food distribution to community feeding agencies

“Our hope is that these grants will not only increase the impact of the 20 organizations, but that General Mills’ involvement might also serve to put a brighter spotlight on their remarkable work so that other organizations and communities elsewhere might learn from and be inspired by these programs that help ensure people are well nourished and that good food is well used,” said Nicola Dixon, executive director of the General Mills Foundation.  

While every effort should be made to prevent food surplus from occurring in the first place, General Mills recognizes that significant volumes of surplus food will continue to be generated by society for the foreseeable future. For this reason, effective and efficient programs that recover and redistribute good surplus food are critical.

“While the scope of food waste around the globe can be daunting, we are encouraged by the results of our efforts and the growing commitment and momentum worldwide to end the waste of good surplus food,” said Dixon. “With continued effort, we believe communities will soon be able to ensure the majority of their surplus food is used to help feed hungry people, rather than go to landfills.”

More information can be found on the General Mills website: https://www.generalmills.com/en/News/NewsReleases/Library/2019/June/General-Mills-announces-Food-Recovery-Champions-winners