‘We can solve hunger’: A Q&A with Cultivate Co-Founder Jim Conklin
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Cultivate Food Rescue, serving Elkhart, St. Joseph and Marshall counties, set out in 2016 with a simple goal: prevent perfectly good food from going to waste. This month, Cultivate leaders announced they surpassed a major milestone: more than 5 million pounds of food rescued.
The not-for-profit, which salvages food from major partners like the University of Notre Dame and Trader Joe’s, repurposes proteins, starches, fruits and vegetables into TV dinner-like meals for school children to take home on the weekends. The organization also now supplies other local food pantries with cold-storage and nonperishable items ordered online and delivered at no cost to the pantries.
The once-small operation has grown from saving between 75,000 and 80,000 pounds of food a year, feeding 100 kids, to collecting more than 2 million pounds of food for more than 1,350 kids.
And with that growth, Cultivate is now midway through construction of a new, 22,000-square-foot cold storage facility that’s expected to open next spring and expand the organization’s capacity tenfold. Cultivate Executive Director Jim Conklin talked to Inside INdiana Business about the organization’s growth and goals as it embarks down a $10 million capital campaign.
What is food rescue?
Food rescue is capturing food that is about to be thrown away. Many times, food isn’t thrown away because it’s bad and spoiled. In our food industry, it’s a long supply chain, so food is often over-ordered and over-made because a business doesn’t want to miss a sale and the cost of having too much food is less than the cost of missing the sale or disappointing a customer.
If you’re in the catering business, you’d never want to run out of food, and if you think about holiday times, when you have family over, you don’t want to run out of food, so you make too much food and you have leftovers. That concept provides you every step of the food supply chain.
But then another big part of food waste, especially at the grower level, is that consumers are really picky. We got — over the last couple of months being fall in Indiana — apples, peaches, watermelon. When a watermelon is too small, too big or has a blemish on the outside, (farmers) can’t sell it to the food distributor that’s giving it to the grocery store, because when we go into the grocery store and we see those watermelons, those aren’t the ones we buy.
So much food is thrown away or discarded before it even gets started in the food supply chain. So, that’s what rescue is to me. It’s perfectly good food that’s about to be thrown away not because it’s spoiled, but because it’s excess. And, that’s what we do. We grab that excess, and then we give it out to members of the community who are struggling with food insecurity.
Who are some of the partners you work with to supply Cultivate’s efforts?
Farmers, watermelon farmers, apple orchards, strawberry farms, blueberry farms, home gardens. Most of the time, we can’t take food from an individual unless it’s a home garden. We can take donations right from the garden, and we do that often.
Restaurants, catering companies, grocery stores through distributors like GFS and Stanz locally, and cold storage warehouses, which many people don’t think of but, before the food goes to the grocery store, it’s sitting in a cold storage warehouse because the supply chain is long.
The partner we work with has a warehouse that’s a million square feet. It’s a freezer that’s literally 23 acres big and there’s so much food stored in there, and they don’t waste a big percentage. They waste about 1.5% a month. But, that’s 20 truckloads of food that gets thrown out that’s not spoiled.
We see that as a great opportunity for us to grow in the future. So, before it even goes to the grocery store, we’re months away from expiration, and the food’s perfectly fine, there’s just too much of it.
How do companies benefit from partnering with Cultivate?
There’s this intangible marketing benefit, especially today for a business to be a part of their community and not just focus on profits solely. And, it’s giving back. Not just giving back the food, but even sponsoring an organization like us or having your team come in and volunteer. We have a lot of corporate partners who do all three; who volunteer with us, donate food, and financially support our organization.
I think consumers today are looking for their businesses to be more productive members of their community and not just solely operating your business. But then, we have financial donors and community members that volunteer.
The big one for food donors, I think, that often is underutilized is an extra tax deduction. When you donate to a 501(c)(3) food [not-for-profit], you get an extra tax deduction. Now, you have to calculate it, so there’s a step that you have to do, but you get to write off the food completely and then you get this bonus deduction which can be pretty substantial. And when you’re in a low-margin business, like a food business, those extra deductions make your operations profitable.
Could it be a little stronger? Yeah, maybe. But it’s still pretty valuable. We had one food donor that gave us $300,000 worth of food, and they had a bonus deduction of $50,000, so it’s not a small dollar amount.
Who receives food rescued by Cultivate?
So, there’s two programs. Our backpack program is K through second graders who are on free-and-reduced lunch, likely who struggle with food insecurity over the weekend. Our goal in our backpack program is to fill the gaps from Friday at lunch to Monday morning at breakfast.
In every school in our community, there are kids that are food insecure. In your rural schools, it tends to be a smaller population. They have very few resources as far as pantries and those kinds of things go. So, being able to send food home to kids who are struggling financially at home in a rural school is pretty valuable, because in an urban environment, you’ll find more food pantries than you will in a rural environment.
So, single moms, oftentimes single parents, kids living with their grandparents, who were really just having a hard time making ends meet. The majority of the kids in our program, their parents work full time and don’t qualify for federal benefits. It’s not just those that are receiving benefits. But those benefits today, even if you’re a single mom at home not working, those benefits don’t last you the entire time and they don’t often go up as fast as inflation goes up and so the supplement of food, even if you’re relying on those benefits, still is sometimes very necessary. But, our pantry program — we call it Cultivate Cares Food Network — it’s traditional pantries. It’s soup kitchens. It’s social service agencies that serve people that you are recovering from drug and alcohol rehabilitation, domestic abuse, homeless centers, and the homeless population.
So, we’re putting food in the hands of organizations that are feeding people every day for free so they can buy less food and take that money they’re saving and really focus on caring for the individual.
Can you help explain our area’s food insecurity?
In Indiana and northern Indiana, we’re probably in the average of 12% to 15% of the population who struggles with food insecurity, about 67,000 adults and children. And, of the 67,000, about 20,000 of them are kids.
Our free-and-reduced numbers here locally are a little bit better than average. About 45% of kids, almost half the kids in our community, rely on the school system to provide breakfast and lunch on a daily basis, but many of those kids on Saturday and Sunday struggle. And, that’s really the target of our backpack program is those 20,000 or so kids in our community who are struggling over the weekend with getting a good meal, and multiple meals, from that time period.
When they come into school hungry, they tend to misbehave because they’re hungry, not because they’re bad children. It’s harder to run. Our minds don’t work as well if they’re not fueled properly. We know this improves their school performance, they come to school more often, which automatically is going to help them do better in school, but then their minds are ready and they’re well nourished, and they come to school ready to learn versus coming to school Monday morning running to the cafeteria because they’re hungry.
Cultivate is building a new cold-storage facility. How will that affect your operations?
The vulnerable population of people in our nation rely on pretty much dry storage pantries with non-perishable food items. We’ve studied this now for 40 or 50 years. This food that we hand out to our less fortunate neighbors is not good for them over time, for their health, and it leads to chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease, and we’ve got to really invest in giving our vulnerable neighbors better food.
It’s really nobody’s fault. When the roots of Feeding America were getting started, not every household had a refrigerator, back in the 50s, but over time, we’ve built this nationwide network of dry storage warehouses that provide portable food items through USDA programs. But, it’s just not enough and most of the food that’s available in our food pantries is non-perishable food because the food pantry doesn’t have cold storage. So, even if the major food bank does, our local food pantries at the retail level, they just don’t have enough resources, and one of those is cold storage.
This cold storage warehouse is really for the entire community to bring in more perishable food, store it here so our pantries have a place to store it, and then when they’re open to serve the community, they can take this cold storage food on the day that they’re open and give it to the people that they serve. So, we want to grow our food rescue operation, but we also want to provide a space for our pantries to have to store food, because food that’s perishable is more healthy, it’s more expensive, and we need more of it in our network to feed our vulnerable neighbors. So really, that’s the crux of it.
And then a lot of food, especially perishable food, is donated by the truckload. If you want to work with a big food donor, you have to be able to say yes to truckload quantities of food. So, we’re going from about 200 pallets of storage to 2,200 pallets of storage, so literally 10 times.
And really what we want to do is build up a supply of food that’s protein, starch, vegetables, fruit — all things that require cold storage — and supplement what our major food banks are doing in this community, because when you go home and you look at your refrigerator and you’re able to buy your own groceries, you want a balance more towards the perishable side than you do the non-perishable side. We all have that in our disposable inventory at home, and we want to provide that same for our vulnerable neighbors.
What other short- or long-term goals do you have at Cultivate?
We really are focused on getting more perishable foods out there, but we also want to really beef up our pantry network in the communities that need it the most. In the not-for-profit food distribution business, pantries are similar to our grocery stores. They fill the same role for vulnerable community members, but when you think about where those pantries are, they’re not planned.
When you put a grocery store in a community, when you put a restaurant community, you look at demographics, you look at income levels, you look at the people in the community, what background are they from, what types of food do they prefer to eat, and then you build your grocery store fitting that demographic model. We don’t do that in the pantry business and it’s really, super inefficient.
In the most vulnerable neighborhoods, we may have a pantry, but in no way is it big enough to serve the number of people that are in that census tract that are struggling with food. We talk about food deserts a lot. I like to call them pantry deserts. So, even though you may have one, if you look at the sheer number of people — 5,000 people in the Census track, 60% of them are living in poverty and are food insecure — and you have one small pantry, that’s not getting the job done. So, I think we can use demographic data to build them up in the communities that they need to be built up in and give the food resources that we need to serve the people.
So, if it’s on the west side of town where you have a Hispanic community, you’re sensitive to what those families eat and what they prefer to eat. It doesn’t really make sense to put food in their hands that they’re not going to eat. It’s just going to be wasted. So, can we get down to that level and use data, what we understand about our community members, and get the food in that community at the level, even through the ethnic preferences that they have, and serve people with dignity and give them choice.
Ever since COVID, we’ve moved away from choice, because it’s efficient to run a food pantry that just puts bags of food into a car when it pulls up. But for us, we use technology and we let our pantries order the food. They understand the community members that they serve so when you give the pantry the choice and they can bring in food that meets their preferences in the community, it’s way more effective. So that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re really trying to build what they call the last mile — a super-efficient, great distribution model.
How can people get involved with Cultivate?
Follow us on social media. You will see great social media posts. We try to use our social media to inform our community members of what we’re doing with the resources that they provide, so it’s a great way to learn about us.
Come and volunteer. Our website has great information on it, but the best way is to come in. If you’re in this community, come and visit us. It’s amazing when you see it in person. What you think about food rescue, and what it really is, is two totally different things and sometimes I think people that haven’t seen it, they think of all the worst things — going into a buffet at midnight and taking everything that remains.
That’s not food rescue, and when you see the watermelons that come in that’s never left the farm field, never went to a grocery store, and you see apples and peaches and a meal that can be microwaved, that has a protein and starches and vegetables, it really starts to change your image of what food rescue is. Coming and visiting is probably the best thing you can do.
Anything else?
We can solve hunger. Mathematically, it’s possible. In the U.S., here, we waste about 133 billion pounds of food. It’s enough food to feed 100 million Americans. We have anywhere from 35 to 50 million Americans that are food insecure, so we have two to three times the supply of food that we make and produce and throw away that we could use to feed people.
We just have to invest in infrastructure and logistics to get it from the businesses that have it to the community members that need it, and that’s the way we see Cultivate. It’s literally filling that gap between those two people, and we believe, with numbers on our side, that hunger is a problem that we can solve.
At the same time, we save all this food from being thrown away and all the greenhouse gasses that went into the food to make it but also that gets emitted when the food goes into our landfills.
Literally, the largest thing we throw away as a society is food waste. Twenty-one percent of what we put in a landfill is responsible for 12% to 15% of our greenhouse gasses. It’s No. 3 on the list of things we could do to reduce greenhouse gasses, and it’s so practical because you do that and you feed a person at the same time, helping a kid receive nourishment over the weekend to perform better in school.
There’s so many wins that come from doing what we do. It’s why we’re so passionate about it. The idea that you can solve hunger in this country is real and the numbers are literally on our side.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the number of meals served to children and the square footage of Cultivate’s forthcoming cold storage facility.