Healthy Food for All/Little John's
Significant local agencies in food recovery are represented by Chris Brockel (left) of Healthy Food For All and Dave Heide of Little John's.
Before the pandemic, groups in Madison that help recover and repurpose food that would otherwise go to waste had their procedures worked out. But these food recovery operations were upended when COVID-19 shut down restaurants, business cafeterias and catering in March of 2020 — the primary sources of excess prepared foods that many food recovery nonprofits habitually turned to. At the same time, the pandemic caused a run on grocery stores, where other food recovery programs had rescued surplus goods about to expire and redistributed them into food pantry boxes.
Since then, things have returned to a kind of new normal, or at least reached a new equilibrium, and now agencies involved in food recovery are trying to join forces to create an informal “triage” system that will help surplus food get to the agency that can best put that particular type of food to use — and keep it out of the landfill.
This is especially important as a new player in food recovery, Little John’s — the ambitious project of Liliana’s chef Dave Heide — ramps up its ability to produce meals cooked from excess food in its kitchen.
“When they’re up and fully operating, that’s going to change the landscape of food recovery for everybody,” says Chris Brockel, longtime area food activist and director of Healthy Food for All, which convened a Nov. 9 meeting of groups involved in this work. Representatives attended from Little John’s, Middleton Outreach Ministry, the River Food Pantry, Second Harvest, Community Action Coalition, Badger Prairie Needs Network, Madison Area Food Pantry Gardens and the city of Madison, among others.
“It was everybody working in food recovery in our region,” says Stacie Reece, sustainability program coordinator for the city of Madison. “Everyone has a different role to play, and bringing everyone around the table to understand what everyone’s working on helps.”
The city is one year into a two-and-a-half-year initiative and grant from the National Resources Defense Council that focuses on reducing overall food waste and “part of that grant is building stakeholder engagement,” says Reece. She believes the November meeting did that.
The city had been focusing on food scrap recycling until last July, when it had to pause a program in which food scraps were accepted for recycling at all three of the street division’s dropoff points. At that time it lost the ability to take them to a digester in Middleton. Reece says plans are in the early stages for a similar program of community composting to start again.
Reece says the NRDC approach focuses on reducing waste before it gets to the point of scrap recycling or composting. “We want to learn more about food recovery,” Reece says.
The city is starting by raising consumer awareness, encouraging buying realistic amounts of food, planning meals, and using what’s in your refrigerator.
But when there is waste, Reece stresses that the city needs to be in the loop, especially when it’s large amounts. “People call the city and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got X amount of food.’ The city can act as a resource where we can say, ‘Here’s the phone number and the coordinator’” of a group that can use it.
Reece acknowledges that ultimately “even the food recovery folks sometimes have more than they can manage. Sometimes they have bread coming out of their ears, because they had a huge donation, and they just didn’t have the right distribution set up to get it out the door.” Finally, if that food has to be composted, the city wants to be able to support that as well.
Have supply chain issues affected food recovery work in Madison? Not really, says Brockel of Healthy Food for All. “We have not seen those food shortages affecting the amount of food being donated.”
Moreover, the issue is not a lack of food: “We don’t need to grow more, we need to understand what is needed and work on our distribution systems.”
What is still affecting Healthy Food for All is that catering remains in limbo. The group used to repackage leftover prepared foods into meals to distribute. “There still aren’t many events, so those large quantities of prepared foods that we were used to getting to [repackage for] community meals aren’t available. It’s just not happening.” The group is working with getting excess produce from farmers to those who need it and has been working with the tiny house community on Aberg Avenue.
Pre-pandemic, Brockel’s group was working on a green catering initiative to raise awareness and increase surplus catered food coming their way. “Now caterers are saying ‘I’ve got bigger worries right now.’ But I think people are also being reflective of their business practices,” Brockel says. “‘How much waste do I have? When things get back to normal, is my business going to look the same as it did before?’”
Brockel is also encouraged that participants at the November meeting have agreed to continue meeting and connecting the dots on which agency wants what kind of food, because “if you start accepting stuff that you don’t really handle and can’t use, that’s just a waste of resources for everybody.”
Heide’s food insecurity-focused nonprofit Little John’s is already increasing the visibility of food recovery efforts in the Madison area. “At the beginning of the pandemic, we had one paid employee,” says Heide. “Today we have 44 employees, and all of them make $20 an hour or more.” This has enabled Little John’s to put out 7,000 meals every week, says Heide, providing food for Meals on Wheels; breakfast, lunch and snacks for several schools; and meals to hotels that are housing persons who are experiencing homelessness. His organization has also been working with Feeding the Youth and the Black Men Coalition to help with food disbursement and delivery and pickup.
Little John's
Workers assemble meals at Little John's.
All this, says Heide, enabled Little John’s to rescue 200 tons of food over the last year.
“It is pretty exciting to know that not only are we able to make healthy nutritious meals, but we’re also able to take that out of the landfill.” Heide describes Little John’s as being “the last mile — we recover from grocery stores and from farms but we’re the last person to pick up from the grocery store.” Heide says that means Little John’s isn’t getting in the way of other organizations that do recovery work. “We’re not impacting their food. This is all stuff that would have ended up in compost or landfill if it wasn’t for Little John’s, so we’re pretty excited about that.”
Unlike other food recovery operations in the area, Little John’s is a kitchen; it takes raw products and cooks meals from them, then packages them for delivery. “We only bring in raw products. So we’ll only bring in produce, meats, bread, anything that would be considered an ingredient.” So far, those ingredients have come solely from Madison’s two Metcalfe’s supermarkets. With temporary facilities at 411 Prairie Heights Drive, that’s about all the food that Heide’s operation can store: “We haven’t expanded those relationships, [and can’t] until we have a big enough storage space.”
Little John’s is working toward remodeling the space at 5302 Verona Road, Fitchburg, formerly A1 Furniture & Mattress, to be a production kitchen and food storage facility.
