local nonprofits. He has since merged that effort with Feeding Silicon Valley and ramped up its efficacy by using the mobile app. “This is what caring communities do—work well, work smarter, and work for good,” says Laura Chmielewski, Team San Jose’s spokeswoman. Sridhar created Waste No Food when he was 16, inspired by field trips to San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Church to feed the homeless. He says his nonprofit online exchange has so far diverted 400,000 meals from the dump. Aside from addressing the societal issues of hunger and waste, the Los Gatos resident says he’s concerned about the environmental impact as well. When food decomposes, each pound of matter emits a pound of methane—a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Another important facet, he says, is conservation. In California, the vast majority of the state’s water goes to food production. “A large part of this is sustainability,” says Sridhar, who’s majoring in economics at Stanford University. “The problem is so vast that we really do need to leverage whatever help we can get to address this.” Peninsula Food Runners, a nonprofit website similar to Waste No Food but without a mobile app, has delivered unused food to community groups in need since 2007. Other apps facilitate small-quantity donations of leftovers with limited legal risk thanks to “Good Samaritan” laws that relieve donors of liability if they give in good faith to a nonprofit. There have been commercial counterparts to the nonprofit drives, too. In the East Bay, a startup called Imperfect Produce has zeroed in on a specific type of food waste: misshapen but perfectly edible fruits and vegetables. Its founders discovered that 20 percent of produce in the US is rejected by grocers because it looks funny. The East Bay company buys “cosmetically challenged” produce for a song and resells it to consumers. Food Shift’s Frasz says she’s heartened to see institutional backing for a project like Waste No Food. But she’d like to see more investment in food recovery. Communities fund recycling and trash hauling, but offer little in the way of monetary support for curbing food spoils. “To a large extent, we rely on volunteers and nonprofits,” she says. “I’d like to see institutions and governments take this knowledge about the impact of food waste and act on it.”
9 DECEMBER 2-8, 2015 | metrosiliconvalley.com | sanjose.com | metroactive.com
meals short of meeting the needs of the region’s low-income families in 2014. The hidden price of food waste is no less staggering. Each year, hunger costs the nation $130.5 billion for healthcare, $19.2 billion in lost academic and workplace productivity and $17.8 billion on charities to address hunger, according to a 2011 report by the Center for American Progress. In 2010, California’s cost totaled $19.6 billion. “The resources are out there to help these people, but we needed a way to connect them,” says Ray Bramson, who leads San Jose’s Homeless Response Team. “We wanted to figure out a way to get these excess supplies to nonprofit service providers, especially kitchens that serve thousands of people a year.” In 2014, he brought the matter to Silicon Valley Talent Partnership, an organization that connects public agencies and nonprofits with privatesector volunteers. The Talent Partnership studied various technologies and met with scores of groups to drum up a regional initiative to curb waste and hunger in one fell swoop. The result was Feeding Silicon Valley, which launched in September. “We don’t need to produce more, we need to waste less,” the Talent Partnership’s Executive Director Lea King says. Thirty-five-year-old Martha’s Kitchen, which serves 25,000 free meals a month in Santa Clara, Santa Cruz, Merced and Monterey counties—and 4,500 a week in San Jose alone—logs on to Waste No Food to claim a fewhundred extra salads and sandwiches from nearby conventions. Guhl says he’s become obsessive about keeping his phone in his pocket so he never misses a push notification from local venues. To scores of churches, shelters and other charities, the online platform has become indispensable. “Before, they lacked an expedient way to get rid of food,” says Kiran Sridhar, the 18-year-old founder of Waste No Food. “For a stadium or a banquet hall, it’s culturally unacceptable for them to run out, but it wouldn’t be efficient for them to every day call every single charity to find out who would take it. There’s a time limit. Food goes bad.” On the app, nonprofits get alerted in seconds once someone posts a notice online. Ewell Sterner, the director of food and beverages for Team San Jose, which runs the McEnery Convention Center, launched an initiative called Hunger at Home three years ago to donate unused food from hotels and venues to