E288: Farmlink's responsive, logistical success preventing food waste

Today we're speaking with Aidan Reilly, co-founder and chief of External Affairs at the Farmlink Project, a national nonprofit connecting farmers with surplus produce to communities facing insecurity. What's especially interesting about Farmlink (https://www.farmlinkproject.org/) is that it was started by college students in 2020 as a response to the food supply challenges our nation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project is now a nationwide movement of college students who provide a key logistical link in a food system that currently sees up to a third of all food produced go to waste. The program delivers fresh produce to food banks as opposed to packaged or processed foods at zero cost, as opposed to charging delivery fees.

Interview Summary

So, you were a student when you decided to take on this issue of food waste. Was there sort of a moment where you realized that there was an opportunity in this area of food recovery? And how were you able to move from an idea to action so quickly, especially just being a college student?

Yeah, I would say the moment where we realized the opportunity was actually well after we started. So maybe a couple weeks after we started. Initially, we figured that we might have been the first people to ever have this idea. We basically went to our local food bank. It was April of 2020 and classes had been canceled. We weren't doing anything, wanted to be helpful in our community. And the food bank told us we don't need any more volunteers. But we do need food and we especially need fresh food. That's what we're really short on right now. And we have a lot more people coming to our food bank compared to usual. And so, they were naming things like eggs, milk, produce. And then I happened to read a New York Times article that was talking about farmers who were dumping those very items due to supply chain breakdown. They were smashing eggs into the ground, dumping into farms because they couldn't store it anymore. And that's where the idea was initially born. And we just figured, why don't we call these farmers and reach out and ask if we can have this excess instead of them dumping it, so we can get it to our food bank. And those initial deliveries that we did, it was basically us driving the trucks ourselves. Driving it on the freeway, getting it to the food bank. But within three weeks, we'd moved a million pounds of food. And we realized, wow, there's potentially not a lever or an existing organization that is suited to solve this issue at scale. And this issue of food waste and fresh food going to waste while people need it, that's definitely not unique to the pandemic. One out of every three pounds of food we grow in this country is getting thrown out on a year-to-year basis. And there's tens of millions of people in the country who could use that. That's when the opportunity struck us that we could do something much, much larger than just a grassroots pandemic project.

Pretty remarkable. So where were you in school at the time? Where did this take place?

I was at Brown University, but I was sent home so I was in Los Angeles at the time.

Okay. So, tell us what Farmlink does and how it works.

It's a pretty basic concept. When I say farm, I'm basically referring to every point along the supply chain before it gets to the supermarket, let's say. So that means all the distribution centers, the packing houses, everything from field to packing house to distribution center, to that food being on a truck on its way to a grocery store. And then the grocery store might reject it due to it arriving late, for example. So when that happens, at the moment there really is no solution for that kind of large scale surplus, that kind of large scale waste. There are a few things you might be able to do. Like at the farm, they might be able to till it back in, use it for fertilizer. They may be able to send it to animal feed. In some cases, they can compost it. In some cases, you can send it to a bio digester to create methane - usable natural gas. That being said, there's so much of this. And oftentimes producers don't have the time. And when we're dealing with 24-to-48-hour window or less, if the food's already on that truck, it's much easier to just send it to a landfill. That's where we make ourselves available. All you have to do is give Farmlink a call. Doesn't matter where you are in the country. Often doesn't matter where you are in North America. We're going to be able to book the truck, find out a location that can receive it in the capacity and the packaging that it's in. And then we coordinate the delivery, and we cover the cost of that delivery so that it's ultimately at no cost to the food banker community.

So how do you support the expenses?

We're 501C3. We're a nonprofit. And we're about five and a half years in. And to this date, we've moved just under 500 million pounds of food. I don't even want to put a ballpark number out there, but it's a fraction of a very small fraction of the cost it usually costs us around, let's say four and a half cents per pound of food that we move and. We do that all through philanthropic dollars. So, grants, corporate partnerships, private family foundations.

That's really nice. And you mentioned that this has grown beyond its original location and you mentioned around the country. So how widely available is this and how big is Farmlink?

We've moved food in every single state in the US. We've also moved food in Mexico and in Canada and are capable of doing so. And, you know, we don't own any assets for two reasons. The first being that there is enough available infrastructure at the moment that we don't think is being taken full, complete advantage of that can take in more excess food than is currently being taken in. The second reason is that if we don't have infrastructure, then we're not beholden to one particular region of the US. In the future, it might make sense for us to maybe get something like a packing house. We think there's enough available infrastructure that just needs to be maximized through connection and that's what we provide.

Tell me how it works. Does the process in a given location get initiated by a call from a farmer saying, I have extra eggs, or extra lettuce, or whatever it is? Or is it a call from a food bank saying, we need these things, and who owns the truck? Who drives the truck? How does all that work?

There are a couple different instances. One very common one actually is from food bank to food bank. So, that process is not a hundred percent efficient. Sometimes it's a lot less than a hundred percent efficient. One food bank receives, let's say they get a relationship with a company that has decided to do some good and donate a huge amount of their product to that food bank. There's kind of a misconception that food banks can take and want to take everything in. So, they might have excess that they're not sure what to do with. Farmlink will actually be able to coordinate. We'll get a call from that food bank. We will just connect them with another partner in our network who might need whatever they have access of, and then we'll facilitate that delivery. We don't count that towards our pounds of food move. That's just one way that we're easily able to make sure food's not going to waste at the end.

The more understandable thing that we do is can really just be a call direct from a farmer. We've received calls from farmers who might tell us that a contract has been cut. We worked with a group of farmers in West Virginia who had a contract cut. They were apple farmers, and they were left with tens of millions of apples that they were basically having to burn them because storing them was so expensive and there was nowhere else they could meaningfully send them. And what we do is we have to basically find the demand. Let's say all the local food banks, institutions are full of all the apples that they could ever possibly need or want. But several states over, organizations, especially rural ones, might have no access to anything like that. We're going to work then with the third-party logistics company. It's kind of like Uber, but for a big semi-truck. Figure out how those apples are going to get packaged. If we're sending it to a local organization that has only volunteers and they don't have a forklift, if you just send them 800-pound bins of apples, it's going to hurt them more than it's going to help them. We've got to figure out how to get it packaged into smaller cartons. We could figure out if they need to be washed, if they need to be processed at all. Most of the time we don't have to do that. But if it's coming direct from a field, you never know. And then we pay for the truck and basically see the delivery all the way through until it gets to that food bank. And then from there, it's important to mention that the food bank itself is not necessarily always the end recipient. It goes from there to churches, schools, it goes in in smaller receivable loads to tens of thousands of different nodes across the country.

Pretty remarkable. As you were building this, what were some of the biggest logistic challenges that you faced, and how did you overcome them?

You know, it's relatively basic supply chain matching. And I don't say that to underplay what my team does because they are working literally around the clock. I mean, you have to work on the farmer's schedule. That's one big thing is that if you wanted to set this up out of the good of your heart and because you believe food shouldn't go to waste, great. But you've got to be ready to work on the farmer schedule. You know, I really don't know a busier working person and it's a Wednesday night and they've got a truck stuck on a road somewhere. Or whoever they might be working with, wherever they're sending it, they've got a truck stuck on the road and you don't pick up their call and you're not ready and capable to figure out how it's going to get sent, then they're never going to call you again. And even though there's all that available food out there, you're not going to have access to it. [00:10:00] And that was a huge distinguishing factor. We're not going to operate on the schedule of the charitable food system, which due to constrained resources having to depend on volunteers, might only be a couple days a week for a lot of these food banks. We're going to basically be available 24-7 and make this possible. The other thing is just the scale. I'll go back to this West Virginia example with the apples, because as far as we can tell, that was the largest food recovery ever done in the United States. We moved 50 million apples across 27 states. It took us about five weeks to do so. And, you can't have even one of those truckloads go wrong. You can't have one of them show up at a place where nobody's ready to receive it. You can't have one of them not be temperature controlled and have something spoil or get stuck. It basically has to be perfect. And that's round the clock extreme attention to detail. Working on the farmer schedule, but working based on the food bank and the community preferences. To be a middleman is a sense of responsibility. We are middleman to make things easier. The second we make it harder, then the importance of something like Farmlink existing is not, you know?

Does all the middlemen activity occur in a one central location or is it somehow distributed all around the country?

Yes, so on any given day, we could be moving food in California, Arizona, Texas, Michigan, Florida, and Ontario. On a given week it could be more than that. We have over 400 different recipient locations that we're pretty regularly sending food to and that we have done.

But is all this work done in one central hub?

No, it's not. It's really decentralized. First of all, our team is decentralized. I'm in New York City. The head of our farmer advocacy is in the middle of Texas. The head of our agency relations is in Los Angeles. We're decentralized. But we're booking these trucks and coordinating. If we're not there in person at the farm, it's happening over the phone, and you can book it from anywhere in the country.

What metrics do you use to make priorities about what to deliver to the food banks and how do you collect data on the impact you're having? And one of the reasons I asked that is that food banks often use pounds of food distributed as the metric for how successful they are. But of course, a pound of broccoli is different nutritionally than a pound of sugar beverage. But it sounds like in your case, that's not such a worry because it's fresh, healthy food. And you're not worried about the kind of packaged processed food.

There's a lot of metrics that get thrown around. We've spent years going over verbiage and that has to do with pounds of. It's not verbiage, it's real impact. I mean, it's pounds of food that we deliver. There's a kind of an industry standard that 1.2 pounds of food you're, you can call a meal. And so, we will kind sometimes refer to it as meals, but we feel like that's a little misleading because 1.2 pounds of onions is not a meal for anyone. There are emissions that's avoided. We basically did years of work to figure out and get a model that is third party verified that shows exactly the methane avoidance for every type of food and where it's coming from, that we avoid going to the landfill.

That being said, I don't think metrics necessarily are going to be what's going to grow this industry into its potential. I think behavior change really could. I think when you look at what, you know, let's call it the food crisis in the United States, and what we see, it's often not that there isn't enough food, it's that Americans aren't getting the right kinds of food. We see refrigerators full that are supposed to be for fresh food that are just full of energy drinks. And people honestly not wanting or not knowing what to cook if they're given a bunch of organic produce. And what we'd like to track is if you can take excess food, surplus produce, get that into a community and do it in a way that is trustworthy such that you can see people start to familiarize with it and you can see diets change and the level of nutrition change over the period of a year or two consistently in that community. How are education levels changing? How are like graduation rates changing? How is the ability to meet your mortgage changing? I mean, there's so many different things that are tied into once you meet your basic level of nutrition that it kind of demands a level deeper of metrics that we're excited to explore but have not been able to yet.

My guess is that this work is especially important at the moment because of cuts to the SNAP program, uncertainty about its future, problems with economies and the cost of food and things. Is that right? Is this an especially difficult time?

Grocery prices are at all-time highs. There's economic uncertainty that comes and goes, but really there's a massive, short term blow that has come with federal funding since the start of 2025. So many, so many food banks that relied on federal cuts or on federal funding had billions of dollars cut from their budget, which means fewer employees, less ability to purchase food to give more round out meal, which means they're going to cheaper, more processed meals. And then to cap that off has been the uncertainty with SNAP that we saw at the beginning of this month where it looked like there was going to be no SNAP benefits given at all. And what ultimately was agreed on is a significantly reduced SNAP benefits going towards Americans.

And you can't forget that SNAP provides more meals to people in the country than the rest of the charitable food system. Every food bank combined by a pretty significant multiplier. All is to say this is becoming a lot more visible for people. The fragility and the line between what it means to be food secure and to not know how you're going to afford your next meal. And that's something that you don't feel like is an issue that you live with day to day in the United States if you have a roof over your head or even if you have a job. But there's over 40 million Americans who are living like that, right at or under the poverty line. It's very relevant. It's the most extreme I've seen it ever, and that include the pandemic.

It's pretty remarkable statement. My guess is that the answer to this question is going to be all of the above. But when you talk to a farmer who donates food to this process, is the farmer doing it because it just helps offload things he or she would have to deal with otherwise? Does it feel good to the farmer to know that all the things that he or she puts so much work into producing is actually getting used? They're helping people? I mean, how does that sort out? Why is it in their interest to do this?

From what we heard from farmers, yes, they work a lot. That's a massive understatement. They work extremely hard and invest an incredible amount into growing this food first and foremost. They definitely don't want to see it just go to waste. And, if they have any ability whatsoever to get it to a secondary market, to be able to turn a dollar on that we don't want to take it. There's no other option for the farmer. We did not approach and do not approach this from the perspective of asking farmers to do this out of the good of their hearts. As much as they might like to, they don't have the time and they do not have the budget to do things out of the good of their heart. One of the things we did right initially and then have always continued to do is approaches from how is this going to save a farmer a headache and maybe save the farmer some money. If you've got a massive pile of something that you can't sell in your backyard it, I don't know if you've ever tried to just donate 50 pounds of something to a food bank. It's not as easy as you might think. Let alone 500,000 pounds. How are they going to call 30 different food banks or compost centers or whatever. It's just that much easier to go to a landfill. And then once they're going to the landfill that, especially depending which state they're in, it costs them money to dump it. There are tipping fees. And if it's already in packaging those can be significant. It can be $3,000 up to we've seen $15,000 for them just to dump fresh food.

So, the concept is we're going to make it just one phone call away, no matter how big your pile of food is, we can take it. If it's 50 million apples or if it's a couple thousand pounds. And then we're going to save you the cost of that tipping fee. And so if we're working with you consistently, because you might grow extra so that if the weather changes, you're not going to under meet your demand. If we're working with you consistently, that's $3,000 on every truckload we're taking from you. That adds up. And then we'll get you a tax write off for a bit of the value of that food. And we are pushing for something that we see here in New York, which is the Farm-to-Food-Tank tax credit, where it's an actual credit that means cash actually back in the farmer's pocket. We'd like to see that instituted on a federal level because ultimately a write off is not enough. And often not taken advantage of for pretty clear reasons. So, that's a long answer, but we're farmers first. We need to figure out what helps them, what's easy for them, and that can put some money back in their pocket. And that's how we're going to be able to get available food to people who need it.

So, let's end with a crystal ball type question. What do you hope the future of Farmlink will be and what will it look like in generations to come?

You know, we put up billboards a couple years back, which said help put Farmlink out of business. And the mindset around that is the future you want to see really one where something like Farmlink is moving billions of pounds of food? Because that means there's still billions of pounds going to waste. It means there's still millions of people who could use that. But my mindset has actually shifted on that. I think what our role is, and organizations that are similar to us, is to show what's possible to drive the political will to institute incentive to have this be an existing lever. I think we've seen other countries do this effectively. The United States is just such a large and extremely productive country that it's a big undertaking. But when you get a big group of students who are able to move half a billion pounds of food on a pretty minimal budget, and continuing to climb that number year after year, then we start seeing people turn their heads and pay attention. Oh, this might actually be possible. And there's a lot of creative things that you could do with this food. You see other companies pop up. Some for-profit some non-profit and basically you develop an industry around this. Food recovery, I think has been an edge case industry where it's been something that's either done locally or it's been done in an incredibly scrappy, grassroots way. The future needs to be that this is an industry and that has the same level of attention as any other industry in the United States. So that we have a built-in solution for billions of pounds of food going to waste. And we can deal with that abundance by re-routing it back to the people in the country who need it. I think that's the kind of country that the United States should be and the one that I think we're working towards. But I think we live in a society where it's got to be done to get people to follow. You can't just say it, you got to go do it. And that's what we're here for.

Well, thank you for your inspired work. It's really pretty remarkable what you've accomplished in such a short period of time, and it shows how much difference one or two, or three people can make if they have vision and passion and creativity in trying to implement new solutions to existing problems. I hope your crystal ball works out and that what you're hoping to come true really will and it would be so good for the planet, for people who don't have enough food, for the farmer, just for everybody in the whole chain. So again, congratulations for such great work and thanks so much for joining us.

BIO

Aidan Reilly is Co-Founder and Chief of External Affairs at The Farmlink Project, a national nonprofit connecting farmers with surplus produce to communities facing food insecurity. Within its first five years, the organization has rescued and distributed nearly 500 million pounds of food that would have otherwise gone to waste.