07 Hungry Harvest – How Can Ugly Food End Hunger? w/ Stacy Carroll

Announcer: Welcome to Sustainability Now, an exploration of technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works. Designed for socially conscious entrepreneurs and individuals interested in responsible stewardship of the planet, Sustainability Now covers food, energy, housing, water, waste, economics, and consciousness. Welcome to your community, Sustainability Now, with your host Mira Rubin.

Mira Rubin: Welcome everybody to Sustainability Now, technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works. I’m your host Mira Rubin and I’m delighted to introduce today’s guest, Stacey Carroll of Hungry Harvest. And Hungry Harvest is an organization with a mission to end hunger and food waste. And Stacy brings a long career of consulting for the hospitality and consumer food industries to her role as Director of Sales and Partnerships at Hungry Harvest. So, welcome Stacey. We’re really glad to have you here with us today.

Stacy Carroll: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Mira: Oh, we’re delighted! So how about if you start out by giving us a little background on Hungry Harvest?

Stacy: Sure. So we started off at the University of Maryland campus. It was sort of a senior project for Evan Lutz, who’s our founder. He needed to, for his entrepreneurial class, find a way to solve a common issue in the world and make it profitable. So he was having a hard time figuring out what he was going to do. He knew that he cared about food, he knew he cared about hunger, but in a space that’s so crowded with so many people trying to do work, he wasn’t quite sure which problem he was  going to be able to solve better than the huge organizations like ReFED or No Kid Hungry that we have so much respect for. So he ended up bumping into a farmer who said, “You know what you could really be do that would make a difference, I have all this food I can’t sell to retail, because they tell me it’s too big, it’s too small or too twisted up. Maybe you can find a way to create a market for that, because otherwise, it’s just going to waste.” So he did exactly that. He started off on campus selling a $5 bag. It was about five pounds for $5. And the first week he had about 20 customers. And this is at College Park, Maryland. So, major university, but right in the middle of a food desert; not a lot happening around there. And then it was like the next week, like 100 customers. Then it was like 300 customers. And he started being like, I don’t think all these people are on campus and realized that he was actually starting to serve the greater neighborhoods and population that surrounded College Park. So when he got up to about 500 customers a week, and he was packing these brown paper bags himself in the parking lot, he thought maybe this is like a bigger issue that I need a little bit more help to solve, and founded Hungry Harvest. Since then, we’ve grown to have about 33,000, I think, at last count, customers.

Mira: Wow.

Stacy: You don’t have to pick up any more now. We deliver to your home or office or hospitals, nursing homes, all different kinds of places. We bring the food to you. And we’re working with a collection of farmers that are all over the world who are experiencing loss of food for different reasons that I think we’re going to get into a little bit later.

Mira Rubin: I’m sure we’re gonna cover quite a lot of ground. You said that this was an entrepreneurial project for Evan. Part of our target audience really is social entrepreneurs. So the fact that you guys are inspired from those kinds of roots, that’s pretty exciting. I’m wondering if you could just give us an idea of some of the hurdles that Evan might have encountered as he was trying to build Hungry Harvest?

Stacy: Sure. So I think the biggest one that stands out to us always is when we get too in our heads about what we want to do, and how we want to do it ,and try to really plan it out, it makes things so complicated. And I think being simple-minded in certain ways of like, Okay, well, there’s all this food, and there’s all these people, let’s just get it to them. And like, alright, well, we’ll just drive it over there. Or just starting to do something today is how you start to learn what the actual roadblocks are going to be; not the perceived roadblocks that you think are going to be. Because everything we thought was going to be ended up being a lot easier and non existent. And some of the stuff that you don’t think about comes up and having the agility of your mind to say, “Okay, I can pivot around that, or I can change what I’m doing, or I can be fluid in my approach,” I think is the most important part of success when you’re creating a new solution for a problem.

Mira: That’s brilliant. So it’s kind of going in with beginner’s mind.

Stacy: Yeh. Just going in with a student mindset and keeping that the whole way through; no matter how big you get, no matter how good you are at it, no matter how many other good people are in the room with you. You still may have the answer, or at least be open to listening to other people’s answers and sort of reformulating your approach and being fluid it is the most important.

Mira: Beautiful. So how many people work at Hungry Harvest these days?

Stacy: Ahh. Wow. So this year was a huge growth year for us. I was employee number 13, which was pretty early days. And now I think we have like 60 full time executive leadership positions, not to mention hundreds of drivers. We’ve got 28 full time warehouse workers. We’ve got... The community of Hungry Harvest is huge right now.

Mira Rubin: That’s amazing. So, I understand that you guys had a stint on Shark Tank.

Stacy: Yes, yes.

Mira: So give us some background about that.

Stacy: I mean, that’s the entrepreneurial dream, right, getting on Shark Tank and getting a deal. And honestly, when we went on, we were not ready. We were still at College Park, and Evan was still packing bags by hand. And, you know, you go in, and you present yourself the way you want to be seen. And they were very attracted to the heart and the mentality and the authenticity that Evan had for the mission. And if you watch the episode, he was sweating to death up there talking about these things. And the way he wanted to sell the business until he started talking about the issue in the way that we work with the farmers. And then it just all melted away. And he was just telling the story of what it is we do to day to day. And that struck Robert as very compelling and he ended up giving us the investment. It was $150,000 for 10% of the business. And at that time, that cash was – we needed it to be able to grow and reach more and more people. And also give us a really high level of credibility as a supplier. But most importantly, it brought a really national focus – you couldn’t ask for a bigger stage – for people to hear, even if we didn’t serve their area, for them to know that the problem of all the food that was going to waste for size, shape, cosmetic imperfection; it was happening in their neighborhoods, too. And we may not be serving that neighborhood, but there’s surely something they could do to help combat that as well.

Mira: Beautiful. So what happened after Shark Tank?

Stacy: Oh, my God, so Shark Tank airs and overnight, we had like 25,000 people who wanted to be customers. It was something like outrageous nationally at that time. So we ended up getting I think it was 2500 customers overnight. Went into crazy mode; everybody’s mom and dad, everybody’s brother, everybody’s friend or a friend packing boxes, calling the farmers we were working with being like, “Oh, my God, we were on Shark Tank, and we have to do all this.” And they were like, “That’s awesome, because we have plenty of food for you.” And we thought there wasn’t gonna be enough food. And it’s like, no, when you start to realize that a third of the food that’s produced in this country is lost or wasted, there’s no way that any one company,even with a Shark Tank episode could possibly run out of food. So I think that was very eye opening for us as well.

Mira: First off, I want to say that maybe we can put a link to the Shark Tank episode on the podcast page. So anything that we reference in this interview, we’re going to have links to on the podcast show notes page at sustainabilitynow.global. That’s just a heads up. The other thing that you mentioned is a staggering number – that a third of the food produced in this country goes to food waste.

Stacy: Yeah, it’s a really unfortunate flaw in the food system. It’s no one entity’s fault. But if we were to sort of place responsibility, a lot of that would be in the hands of the retailers. You know, we’ve come to expect these beautiful food pyramids when you walk in the grocery store and everything’s the same size and shape, and everything’s bright, bright colors, almost unnaturally bright colors, and waxy and shiny and beautiful. And that’s because that’s what the food looks like, on television. So when they advertise it to you – and really the advent of color TV is when we started to change the way we saw what food should look like. And lots of areas of our life, lots of areas of our life should look different, right, on account of TV. So you go in the store, and you’re looking at this exceptional abundance of food, and all these bright colors, and whatnot, and there’s a retail standard that the farmers have to try to achieve, that’s not natural. So you end up getting things that are waxed or colored or artificially done to me meet that standard. And so in doing so, you end up with an awful lot of waste, because about a third of what you grow isn’t going to meet that perfect spec. That’s not how things grow. So previously, there were some outlets for that. A lot of food gets donated of course. A lot of food will get purchased for processed grade stuff. It still leaves a huge amount of food in the system that just ends up in a landfill or gets wasted. A third that’s grown doesn’t get sold to retail. 40% of that goes to waste. So we’re talking huge, huge amounts. And really, you can’t blame people for where... what they’ve been taught to do, by marketing what they’ve been taught to purchase for. But what we’re hoping to do is just change the perception of, if the carrot’s not the right size or shape, or if it’s twisted, I betcha it’d make a really cool Instagram post, or it’s going to taste just as good. And creating new customers was important to our responsibility to the farmers because we didn’t want to do the work in showing that food waste is beautiful or funny vegetables are gorgeous, and just as nutritionally valuable, and then get the folks who were buying the number ones now are just going to buy number two’s because we’re still displacing how much farmers are able to sell. So we wanted to connect that to a customer who didn’t have access to food in the past, which is why we sell our fruits and vegetables at such a discount: to ensure that folks that weren’t able to get as many fruits and vegetables on the table as they wanted, or didn’t have experience with whole foods in the first place, now felt like this is something that they could also participate in.

Mira: How does it work? I know, actually I know how it works. But would you share with our audience how it works?

Stacy: Yep. So. from start to finish: a farmer grows their crop, they have a relationship with us in which they say, “Hey, Stace, I’ve got 40,000 pounds of sweet potatoes, and they’re all size shape funny.” We’re like, okay, we’ll buy that from them, they’ll put it on a truck that was already coming to Baltimore, to whatever city. Well, let’s call it Baltimore since that’s the easiest one for me to keep referencing. It’s already coming to the Baltimore Terminal Market where all the foods go. They’ll drop off their number ones to Whole Foods, they’ll drop off their number ones to Harris Teeter name it grocery stores, anybody. And then the same exact sweet potatoes that were grown in the same field by the same farmer with the same goods, the littler ones, and the really big ones get dropped at our dock. And so they do that at a discount. We then pass that discount on to our customers. Because now we’ve purchased sweet potatoes, zucchini, exotics, all different things; we curate them into a box. We then send you out a notice on Monday saying, “Hey Mira, this is what we’re putting in the box. It’s one leafy green four or five types of vegetables, two to three types of fruit.” You can say, “I don’t really like apples, I’d rather have more oranges,” or “I’m not really into kale, I’ll take the collard greens.” You customize it to make sure that there’s no waste when it gets to your house. And then it gets delivered to your home. Every time you get a delivery, we subsidize or donate food to a hunger relief organization in the area of that city that we’re serving to make sure that other people get a meal too. So farmers get paid what they would have usually just had as a loss. They tell us, they set that price. We pass on that discount to our customers. Our customers get it delivered to their home, and then they also know that one of their neighbors gets to eat fresh too. So it’s sort of just a win win for everyone.

Mira: Win, win, win everywhere – all the way around.

Stacy: Yeh, there’s not a downside to it.

Mira: So actually, one of the things that we had discussed was that a lot of food waste comes from people being unaware of how they can best utilize the produce they get.

Stacy: Yep, so we’ve taken the mystery out of why the food’s going to waste in the farm and logistics level, and we’ve connected it now to you. And now you get this box of produce, and you’re all excited about it. And then we’ve also been taught to eat for our mood. So you may have on Monday said, “I want the collard greens and this and this and this.” And then on Thursday, your box comes and you’re like, “No, I think I want to order out.” Or, “I think I want to do this.” Food waste in the home is the product of good intentions. We either buy too much or we take too much because we have these good intentions that we’re going to cook five nights that week and we’re going to eat healthy; that whole week’s going to be our fresh eating week. And then life gets in the way. You know, your kid’s swim meet runs long, or you get out of work later, or your husband wants to take you on a date or whatever the case may be, and some of that food starts to go to waste because we forget about it. What we try to do is say, “Take as much as you know you’re going to use realistically. Be realistic with yourself about it. It’s okay if you don’t cook five nights a week. It’s okay if you don’t eat fresh five nights, or seven nights a week.” And how to store it is so important, and I’ll put a link to our produce storage guide. We have what we call the refrigerator coffin drawer, which is the bottom drawer that you put your everything in. Why? I don’t know. Right? Right in front of is like all the other stuff, right? And then we’re like, let’s put all the fresh food out of sight and never see it. And you open that drawer up and you’ve put corn and you’ve put maybe like avocados and tomatoes, and you’ve put maybe bananas or something in there. And all of the ethanol that’s coming off of that product as it’s – I mean anything that’s grown decays – so as it starts to mature, those gases mix in that coffin drawer and it escalates the rotting process. And so you could put something down there one day, and you go to use it the next day and you’re like, “Whoa, what happened?” because of the way that we’re storing the foods. We’ll give you a link to the storage guide too and some pro tips on how best to store things.

Mira: That would be great. And just a reminder to everybody, that’ll be on the sustainabilitynow.global website on the podcast notes for this interview. One of the things you shared was about storing bananas and avocados together.

Stacy: Yes, so if you want them to ripen. Like I personally, I’ll buy – another hot tip at the grocery store – buy the single bananas. They never get purchased. People like to buy them in bunches. Be that person who’s like, “I’ll just buy four or three of the ones that are already single.” Don’t break off the bunch. So if you do that, not only will they stay longer, because they’re not connected to the rest of them that’s increasing their ethanol production, they’ll last you a little bit longer. But then if you have your avocados, and you’re like, “All these aren’t really that ripe yet.” You want to store those together, because they’re going to ripen more quickly together. But if you get a yellow banana and a ripe avocado, and you put them together, that is a marriage made in hot heaven, and they will not make it through the week. So, in the storage guide you’ll get fun tips like that, like how to store things together to have longevity, or to improve the ripening process. And there’s some hotly contested things. This is by no way the bible of produce storage; it’s just some stuff that we think works really well. If you love cold tomatoes, by all means, put them in the fridge, even if we say keep them on the counter.

Mira: Another thing you talked about was using parts of the produce that people don’t generally use, like better food utilization. So maybe you could give us some tips around that.

Stacy: Yep. So we’re all about innovation and encouraging people to again, create new products that folks can use so that we can continue the cycle of reinvesting in agriculture at all different pieces. So when you go to the store, or you get your Hungry Harvest box,  and let’s say you get a bunch of carrots. And you see that there’s this much carrot, right, and there’s this much of the tops. And we’ve been taught to cut those tops off, throw them away or compost them. Huge, huge loss there. That’s probably about half the plant, half of what you paid for it. So we partnered with the James Beard Foundation, who’s the authority on food. And you’ve probably got a James Beard chef that everybody loves and follows in their minds. Our biggest partner is Ashley Christiansen, and we’ll put some links to her cookbooks on food waste. She’s based in Raleigh, North Carolina. She was just named Chef of the Nation and she has come up with a bunch of different ways to use the whole plant so that you’re getting the most for your money. One of her famous recipes is Carrot Top Pesto. So you can use the greens just like you would basil or anything else to beef up that pesto, and there’s a ton of nutrients in those greens. Add your pine nuts, add your garlic, add your olive oil, throw it in a blender and boom. You’ve got a sauce for a pasta or for veggie dish. She’s also done some really great work with making broccoli leaf kimchi. When you get broccoli, you never see the leaves, right? You just see the huge stalk. We’re used to eating the florets throwing out the rest. Well, in this case, you can use the broccoli leaves like you would any other rough leafy green. So you can sauté it up. You can kimchi it. You can do all kinds of things with it. Throw it in your smoothies, etc. Also, with that stalk, she makes a slaw that she’ll put into a salad to add a little bit of crunch, tons of nutrients. Again, a whole part of the plant we weren’t using before that is perfectly edible and delicious.

Mira: One of the things that I see you guys doing is not only educating the public, but also educating the food industry to potential new products, yeah?

Stacy: Yep. We want people to keep innovating new products that use the whole plant or that help reduce waste that are truly authentic to creating a new market and helping people eat more fresh, eat better. Fermented goods is one of the best ways to use up and save a lot of your produce. Out here we have a company called Sweet Kraut that makes all kinds of different crazy sauerkrauts with everything from whole vegetables, to florets, to leaves to odds and ends, and it’s a great thing.

Mira: One of the things that you’re responsible for – the primary thing you’re responsible for – is partnerships. And I alluded to your long career, but we didn’t really say how illustrious your career had been before coming to Hungry Harvest. And it’s a result of that career that you have some of these really powerful partnerships. So I’m wondering if you could give us a little bit more about your background and how it led to your connections.

Stacy: Sure. So like all little girls who want to end up in the hospitality industry, started with a degree in theater and immediately began working for a restaurant in Manhattan. So, from that, I came to realize as much as I loved theater, the theater of hospitality was a place that I was really going to have an opportunity to grow and make a name for myself, and I just found myself getting more and more deep into it. I started off with special events planning and did some very high end events planning: restaurant openings through Be Our Guest, I’ve worked with Union Square hospitality, I’ve worked with Design Cuisine in Washington, DC. And through that you have a collection of clients: people like the American Heart Association, American Cancer, James Beard Foundation, Quaker Oats, various other folks who are doing either their holiday parties, company, galas, CSR, different things that they’re working on, and I was their caterer for years. When you feed people, there’s a certain level of trust that they put in you. So when I moved on from doing high end event planning to... I was actually a customer of Hungry Harvest first and got to thinking like, what’s really going to make me happy? Where can I make a big difference? I wrote to them, and I was like, “This is what I do, this is who I am. And I’d like to work for you.” And they made up the job for me at partnerships. So what I was able to do with that is then take all of the relationships I had from folks who trusted me for feeding them and their families for years and say, “Hey, this is something I’m doing now. This is important. This is why you should support it.” And they were like, “Okay, Stace. Yeah, sure. Okay, yeah, we’ll do it.” That’s how we started building partnerships.

And one of the partnerships that I’m most proud of started with Washington Adventist Hospital – was a former client – and had an issue with how do we feed our chronically ill patients who are coming to the hospital for core services, basic needs like food, water, shower, place to sleep, stuff like that. And they, as a core tenet of their religion  and of their hospital, believe that food is medicine. And so we developed this program together called Harvest Rx. T here was 20 patients that they identified as chronically ill who could better benefit if they could just get the right foods. Their diabetes or hypertension or whatever sort of circumstance was going on would be alleviated and would help them be treated better in other parts of their journey. So we started delivering to them. And after about six months, we found that the feedback was things like better numbers on diabetes, better numbers on hypertension, the mentality that they could actually achieve good health, things like because they weren’t food insecure anymore, they could work on getting a job. They could work on spending more time with their children. There was just all of these incredibly positive things that came out of this $15 every other week box of produce that got delivered to their door. It was also one of the first times that we got the feedback, “The food that I got, I felt was high end or I felt was a gift.” It wasn’t the old sort of, you get what you get when you’re in a bad situation and you should be thankful for anything. They felt taken care of, they felt seen. And through that –  eating well – they started to build better lives. So we were like, “This seems like something we should definitely use.” There is no magic pill in health. But there is sort of a magic diet that can help at least alleviate some of the symptoms or make your medicines work better, make your, your whole body work better. So we’ve grown that program now from the first 20 patients to I think we’ve got like 4000 patients now. And we’re working with St. Agnes Hospital, Washington Adventist, Mercy, The Coordinating Center, The Center on Aging for both Washington, DC and Maryland, and looking at, as our other territories grow. We tend to beta program things in Baltimore, where we can really control them and then these will get pushed out in 2019 to all of our markets. That’s the partnership that really helped propel us into a program that is reaching people who never... You know, there’s folks – we’ll send them a sweet potato and they’re like, “Why is it orange?”

A potato’s a french fry. And it’s not their fault. Chronic Illness and chronic poverty are, go hand in hand. And so when we’re fighting at least chronic illness with fresh fruits and vegetables, we’re starting to create better food justice in the neighborhoods that are forgotten and that, you know, the farmers market doesn’t go to.

Mira: What you’re talking about really is, I think, an unspoken un... invisible issue for a lot of people; the profound impact of good food on health, on well-being, on awareness, on economy, on jobs, it’s really profound. So what you’re doing provide food to folks that are otherwise unable to access it or afford it is profound.

Stacy: Thank you. We’re just trying to meet people where they’re at and get people fed. And truly, in each and every one of the employees here and our partners and investors, there’s a core tenant of, we believe that food is a right, not a privilege, and that everyone deserves the right to fresh food, especially when there’s so much food in the market. And if you talk to any farmer, their biggest nightmare is the fact that they go to bed at night, knowing somebody went hungry when they had food in their fields for them. And so that’s,, that’s one of the things that as we continue to do this work, there’s so many high highs and so many low lows and in those lows, saying, “But the solution is there, we just need to better connect people.”

And it can’t be just us, it’s going to take all kinds of organizations and people ask us, you know, “Do we have competitors?” I’m like, “No, we have partners.” We’re never going to be the one guy who can do everything. Nobody can. But how can we all work together with even really large retailers like Walmart or Target that also have fresh fruits and vegetables to say, how are we all treating the food system differently and saying, “Just because this is the way that it was, doesn’t mean it’s the way that it has to be.”

Mira: It’s a perfect segue into discussing ways that people can make a difference. First, let’s talk about how they can get involved if they want to support Hungry Harvest, they want to get involved in the food justice aspect of things. And then after that, I’ll ask you how individuals can get involved too.

Stacy: Great. So broadly, in our markets, if, if we serve your market, you’re welcome to sign up for the service and know that that’s the easiest way to support Hungry Harvest.

Mira: Let me let me just interrupt you for one second, because you’re talking about your markets, but we haven’t identified what they are. So if you could share that.

Stacy: Sure. So we do all of Baltimore, and like an hour outside Baltimore, all of Washington, DC and about an hour outside DC including Northern Virginia, all of Philadelphia, again, surrounding areas, the Research Triangle of Raleigh,all the way out to Chapel Hill, Detroit all the way out to Ann Arbor and all of South Florida. And that’s our existing markets right now. You’ll see us in 2019 covering almost all of the East Coast and much of the Midwest.

Mira: Great. And as far as involvement, how can people get involved in supporting not only Hungry Harvest by purchasing your boxes, but your social initiatives?

Stacy: Yeah, so a great way to do that is to follow us on social media @HungryHarvest. And if you’re interested in doing some hands on work, we don’t offer volunteer opportunities as an organization ourself, but we’re very connected to people like The Food Trust, Philabundance, Capital Area Food Bank, CHEER, all different types of hunger relief organizations that do need those volunteers. But we can act as an aggregator and talk with you and say, “What are your interests?” and then refer you to one of our partners where you can do some direct work. And I would say that that’s more a national offer than it is just in our markets because a lot of the organizations that we touch are national and we can direct you to the right people there.

Mira:  Great. And maybe you could give us a clue as to some of the other projects that you’re involved in.

Stacy: At Hungry Harvest?

Mira: Yeah.

Stacy: My personal favorite thing that I do at Hungry Harvest, outside of HarvestRx which is my like heart project, but when you need a little lift, and something else to do, there’s a person on my team, Will who... We are the great collaborators, and everyone sort of recognizes us as constantly getting in each other’s business, and like improving it in the way that we have this really special relationship of listening to each other, even though we’re on very different tracks. So my favorite project at Hungry Harvest is something called Produce In A Snap, which is run by Will McCabe, and it’s our food access markets. So in addition to making donations to the hunger relief organizations, we’ve got about 35 markets across Baltimore, and in different areas of Maryland – they’re coming to DC, they’re coming to all of our markets – in which we set up a essentially a mini farmers market in a low income neighborhood, or a food desert neighborhood, often in partnership with a hospital or another one of our hunger partners where you can come and you can purchase your $7 bag of produce, sort of like back to our roots of the $5 for five pounds, except now it’s about 10/11 pounds of produce for $7. We accept Snap BBT at these markets. And what’s so great about it is, it’s one of the only programs that allows you to purchase your own food. It’s subsidized by Hungry Harvest customers. But it’s not just free food, because there’s so much work that we do for the most hungry people. But we don’t think about the folks who are too afraid to sign up for government benefits because of all of the stuff that’s going on with immigration. We don’t think about the folks who had like, my parents had me very young, they both worked. They both were seemingly from all outward appearances, middle class, but there were times when they would lay out the bills and say, “Okay, are we’re gonna pay the light bill first or the rent first? Are we going to buy food, are we not going to buy food?” And for those folks, they’re not going to go to a food bank, but they will go to a farmers market, and they will go to a community market like ours to purchase their own food to have better access. And that’s one of my most favorite programs Produce In A Snap. And so we work a lot on that and on the stories of folks who are shopping those markets. And what’s great about that is you’ve got people at the St. Agnes Market, for example, it’s right in West Baltimore. And so you’ve got folks from the neighborhood who are coming, which –  it’s a sort of low income neighborhood, in the neighborhood. And then you’ve got like the head of neurosurgery also shopping this market, which allows you to see food is a unifier. And it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you come from. This is the level of food that everyone deserves. It just gives a certain higher level of dignity, higher level of credibility to the food and it, it helps you get to know your neighbors – people you would never ever, you know, meet maybe. And you’re seeing them week after week at the same market and you’re starting to break down sort of the barriers between you. And that’s my favorite thing we do at Hungry Harvest, run by Will.

Mira: That’s brilliant. It’s sort of an unexpected benefit.

Stacy: Yeah.

Mira: Breaking down social barriers. It’s pretty awesome.

Stacy: Yep, we’ll get partners like, Quaker Oats is an incredible partner of ours. They do so much work in the hunger space and nutrition space. They’ll donate like 500 canisters of oats to go out to the produce and Snap markets. with some recipes on how to make overnight oats or how to live a heart-healthy life. Pompeian. Olive Oil has donated to us – that’s a Baltimore local company – some salad dressings and stuff, just those little things that you don’t think of that people really need to complete a meal. And so that’s a really great project that I love here.

Mira: So if we have listeners from companies that are interested, are you their pointed of contact?

Stacy: Yeah, it would be me. And we do everything from company wellness benefits, where we do special discounts for your employees to sign up for Hungry Harvest to, if you wanted to donate product to Produce In A Snap, or work on a zero-waste recipe with us or our chefs. Really, we curated partnerships to every single person who wants to try. So there’s something we can do no matter the size of the company.

Mira: Love it. So how about recipes? Do you have a book that you could recommend that might have some of these wonderful recipes in it.

Stacy: Yes. So Ashley Christiansen has a new cookbook out and the name escapes me exactly this second but that’s

Mira: We’ll put it on the website.

Stacy: We’ll put it on the website. So that has incredible recipes for just simple meals to make at home using the whole plant that taste great that are simple, easy. Aside from that, you can check out our recipe club, it’s Hungry Harvest recipe club on Facebook. I’ll post the link to that. And what’s great about that is it’s collaborations from people all over the nation that are either getting the book or are just interested in zero-waste recipe. So somebody will be like, “What do I do with eggplant?” and she’ll get like 400 different ways to do it. We like to keep it community conversation and sort of get people talking about food.

Mira: Great. So you told us a little bit about you in terms of having challenges growing up and your focus on food. I’m wondering if there was any really formative thing that got you on this sustainability type bandwagon?

Stacy: Yes. So this reminds me of a story when I first got the job at Hungry Harvest and I was so excited. And I call my dad I was like, telling them all about what it does, what it does. He’s like, “ Listen, kid, I mean, I’m proud of you. And I’m excited about that. But this isn’t a new idea. Daddy’s been shopping dented can sales for years. This is what you’re talking about, like, you know, buying the funny stuff and hoping you get a discount on it.” He’s like, “That’s how you grew up. So maybe that’s why it resonates with you.” I did not grow up in any way, what I would call food insecure. I would call my parents very food savvy. One of the things that I continue to do to this day is –my father was an incredible chef and he still cooks an awful lot for us – he would make monster meals we would call them, which was like, okay there’s spaghetti leftover from this and we’ve got a little bit of fresh zucchini, and how can we put it together and put some garlic on it and it’s going to be delicious. And so is this something that I continue to make to this day. And I think when you grow up with parents who have such respect for the land and such respect for food, and for each other, and want to do their best, you know, on whatever means they have, it’s definitely helpful and continues with you. Now I went just as far away from hunger and food resourcefulness as I could with my career for 12 years. I did extremely high end fine dining. So, and my sister is the regional buyer for Whole Foods. So we definitely grew up and we’re like, “Food is important and we want to be at the absolute maximum level of food.” And then as I started to realize the absolute maximum level of food includes tons of food that’s getting tilled under and tons of food that could be best feeding people, it really it sort of stretches your mind on, on what, what you can be doing personally to bring higher credibility to fresh foods, and what’s acceptable to eat, what’s not, and creativity. And so that’s a little bit on the journey of how we got to here. But my family is definitely a food family, even when we didn’t have food.

Mira: So it sounds like it’s a perfect fit.

Stacy: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And they, my parents, they still, they live in Connecticut. They’re very jealous, they don’t get the box. So when I go home for holidays, I bring them one and my dad pretends like it’s Chopped and wants to make everything out of it. So, maybe we’ll do a blog on dad’s recipes from the box.

Mira: That sounds like it would go over really, really well, actually.

Stacy: Yep. Monster Meals from the Box.

Mira: I love it. So what do these boxes run? Just so that when our viewers and listeners go and check it out, they know what to expect.

Stacy: The barrier to entry is very low. It starts at $15, and that’s for about 10 pounds of produce. You can get it every week or every other week. Most people, if you’re one person, I would say get it every other week, the Mini Harvest. Because you don’t want to be overburdened and then you end up with a ton of stuff you’re wasting and you sort of get away from the reason you got into it the first place. But they go all the way up to Super Harvests, which are $35. It’s about 30, 30 pounds of food, maybe a little bit more. We’ve got a strictly organic line, just veggies line, just fruits line. Plus we have an add on market, because it’s not just fruits and vegetables that are going to waste in the market due to size, shape, or logistical imperfection. It’s those pesky expiration best by, sell by, use by dates that keep everybody confused. And you can have a granola or cold pressed juice that has three months on the expiration date still but the grocery store can’t buy it because it’s too close and they won’t take the risk that it won’t sell. So, you can buy those products at Hungry Harvest. If you’re buying week to week, we know with three months left on that expiration date, you’re probably going to use it. So there’s tons of products that are either made from food waste, help reduce food waste, or what’s called short code, which means it’s perfectly good fresh product, three months or more on their expiration date – just can’t be sold to retail.

Mira: Great. This has been really delightful. I’m wondering if you want to add anything to wrap up with, and also maybe give folks an idea of what they can do – just a review of what they can do – to help reduce food waste.

Stacy: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I have had a blast talking with you. I can’t believe 45 minutes has already passed. It feels like since this got started. But I would say if you have a thought on something you can do, just try it. If you’ve always wanted to innovate a new product, just try it. And if you’re a person who’s looking to start your own sustainability business, if you want to go the nonprofit way go that way if you’re really good at grant writing. You can go for profit way and use your profits for social enterprise like we do. Just don’t feel pigeon-holed into anything. But really, it’s about taking that first step and just giving it a try, and knowing you’re going to fail, and keeping resilient, and keeping sort of fluid in the ways that the world is going to bring you to the solutions. If you want to get involved in something right away, I would say a couple of organizations that we love working with is Repair The World. They’re a national organization. They are based in Baltimore. It’s repairtheworld.org I believe. And they do incredible volunteer work and they will meet with you and independently help you find where you should go for your interests and time. We also work with the Food Recovery Network, incredible program run by Regina, who is a great friend of ours. They work on college campuses, so that all the food at the end of the cafeteria day gets donated instead of thrown away. And so, they’re incredible if you’re young and in college and trying to figure out where to go. Evan also worked for Food Recovery Network before starting Hungry Harvest. And honestly, go to your local food pantries. See if they need help serving meals. See if they need help aggregating food, gleaning. There’s so much out there to get involved with to at least give yourself a base education or help out where you can. Stacy, thank you so much. This has been really wonderful.

Stacy: Well, I appreciated it.

Mira: As did we. So, this has been Sustainability Now. I’m your host Mira Rubin. I want to thank you our listeners, and those of you that are watching us on video. Thank you so much for taking action in the world.

And, until next time, live your best life love the world around you. And together we can save the world.

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