Cultivate Food Rescue reaches milestone in northern Indiana
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Cultivate Food Rescue announced last week that it has reached a major milestone.
The South Bend non-for-profit has rescued more than 5 million pounds of food since opening in 2016.
Serving Elkhart, Marshall and St. Joseph counties, Cultivate works with local grocery stores, restaurants and other food retailers to collect and redistribute food that would otherwise go to waste.
The organization has distributed more than 800,000 meals to area students, neighbors and pantry patrons, and broke ground earlier this year on a new cold storage facility to further extend the life of perishable products collected by the organization.
“This is just the beginning,” Cultivate co-founder and Executive Director Jim Conklin said in a news release. “Momentum is building for what we’re doing, and once we have our new facility complete, we’ll be able to rescue nearly 20 million pounds of food in a year.”
The new facility, being constructed near Cultivate’s current location on Prairie Avenue in South Bend, will allow the not-for-profit to rescue 19 times more perishable food than it’s able to save in its current facility.
“63,000 people living in Elkhart, Marshall and St. Joseph Counties don’t know where their next meal is coming from,” Conklin said. “With the improved efficiency of our new facility, Cultivate will have the capacity to provide nearly two meals per day to every food-insecure child and offer a vital daily meal to 62% of our vulnerable adults and children living in poverty in our three-county region.”
More information about Cultivate’s services is available online at CultivateFoodRescue.com.