Greater Chicago Food Depository Herman Carnie Food Donations: Food Safety and Logistics

Overview The Greater Chicago Food Depository, Chicago’s food bank, is a nonprofit food distribution and training center with the mission of providing food for hungry people while striving to end hunger in our community. Every year, 812,100 people in Cook County – 1 in 6 – receives food from one of the Food Depository’s member agency grocery or meal programs. More than 71 million pounds of food distributed last year.

Starbucks update: In February of 2016 The Greater Chicago Food Depository began our Starbucks adventure. Starbucks corporation at the insistence of their store teams , looked for ways to rescue their unsalable foods to distribute to their hungry neighbors. They wanted a program that would include a pick up from all their stores 7 days per week, and the pick ups are to be overnight so there would be no interference to their daily customer service.

Mercato Program Starbucks was also launching their new Mercato program and knew this program would offer an increased variety of foods to be donated. Beyond the pastry items available, the Mercato program provides high quality ready to eat lunch and dinner options which adds nutritional value and the convenience of ready to eat meals which is especially convenient for our clients in shelters or feeding centers and can easily be used as the to go options for agencies that serve the homeless. Dairy and coffee items have been added to the program as well which helps support a variety of items for our clients needs.

MealConnect We then were able to be testing site of a new APP through Feeding America that would enable our drivers to enter their pounds retrieved on a mobile device. As with any new App, the trip from Concept to practical use can be a bumpy road. At our invitation, the developer of the program sat side by side with me in order to understand our change requests and to assure any new updates into the application worked in manner that benefited us in time and simplicity, a well as categorizing the pick ups along with GCFD’s core categories. As with any application updates, training is necessary. Driver training sessions took place here at 8pm before their routes began. These training sessions also gave us a chance to connect with the drivers to address any challenges they might have.

Our commitment to our 7 day per week overnight pick ups from our from our first group of stores has generated for us 468,861 pounds of new products captured by our team since we have started the Starbucks program Starbucks commitment to us has been substantial beyond the pounds we are generating. And in gratitude for the “ heavy lifting” and all the efforts of the GCFD team, they have increased their incentive offering per store to help benefit the further needs of GCFD.

Thank you