The target population for the food redistribution program was all permitted food businesses and eligible entities such as public school districts in the county. In Los Angeles County there are approximately 32,000 brick and mortar” permitted food businesses and 79 primary and secondary school districts, many of which have cafeteria kitchens. The total number of food permits in the county is higher, at roughly 40,000 because one business address may hold several different food permits. Supermarkets, for example, may hold different permits for their deli, bakery, and grocery sections, respectively.
The causes of food donation inefficiency primarily lie in the complexity of handling perishable products in difficult geographies, schedules, and with limited capacity to quickly transport them. ReFED frames this challenge succinctly in their report, The 2016 Roadmap to Reduce U.S. Food Waste by 20 Percent”, In this complex web of overlapping local networks, scale and transaction costs matter immensely. Large batches of food, such as a few dozen tons of potatoes, need significant transport, storage, and nonprofit labor and processing resources to be effectively utilized before spoiling. Conversely, if one bakery wants to donate a bag of 50 bagels, it is often hard to justify the labor and infrastructure costs needed to transport it to a donor recipient. The sector relies heavily on volunteer and philanthropic support.”
As a response to this challenge, mobile applications and end user (nonprofit) organizations focused on food recovery began to grow in popularity. Local health departments in California, including DPH, took initiative to train their environmental health enforcement officials to inform food businesses about safely donating surplus food. Los Angeles County leads the way in California to advance food waste reduction, edible food recovery, and food distribution. Since 2016, the County of Los Angeles implemented several programs and initiatives to address the growing issue of food waste and food insecurity. From 2016 through 2019, NPAP, through its Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education (SNAP-Ed) partnered with several community-based organizations to provide nutrition education in conjunction with food waste prevention and surplus food distribution efforts. This work was well received among the organizations and their clients. In 2016, DPH's Environmental Health Division established the Los Angeles County Food Redistribution Initiative, a multi- sector initiative that brought together County departments, businesses, community members, and nonprofit organizations to provide resources to the public about safe methods to prevent, donate, and recycle food, as well as support policies that divert food from landfills.”
Various mobile applications operating on the basic function of connecting those with food to those who need it most have come and gone, while others have thrived. In the ReFED report, an analysis was conducted of 25 prevention, recovery, and recycling strategies to reduce food waste. ReFED determined that donation matching software was the 4th most cost-effective strategy to mitigate food waste after standardized date labeling, consumer education campaigns, and packaging adjustments. A 2018 evaluation of food distribution efforts in Los Angeles County identified time and transportation as the two most critical challenges for community-based organizations (CBOs) that distribute recovered produce. Additionally, a 2019 report by the Public Health Alliance of Southern California included a recommendation to support further development and use of technology (e.g., mobile applications) to help connect businesses with surplus food to community-based organizations that accept food donations.
The basic functionality of these apps differ in whether they match” or list” available food donations. Matching of food donations refers to a process in which a food business alerts that a certain quantity or type of food is available for free and a nonprofit that has identified its parameters for what it is willing to accept, is notified of a compatible food type, quantity, its location, and pickup window. Listing of food donations is akin to a Craigslist-type of posting in which a food business notifies the app of its available food, allowing for the food to be found by a nonprofit organization. Some food donation software companies have embedded the feature to provide transportation for donated foods, and though these incur fees for the user, it allows community-based organizations to save time and labor by not needing to dispatch a volunteer at odd hours of the day.
Due to growing concerns about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions in accelerating climate change, the State of California passed SB 1383, the Short-Lived Climate Pollutants law. The Short-Lived Climate Pollutants: Organic Waste Methane Emissions Reductions” law (SB 1383) took effect on January 1, 2022 and is the most significant waste reduction mandate to be adopted in California in the last 30 years. Per California's Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery, part of this law requires that 20% of currently disposed edible food be recovered for human consumption by 2025. Part of the requirement for jurisdictions is to establish an edible food recovery program that recovers edible food from the waste stream and conduct outreach and education to all affected parties, including generators, haulers, facilities, edible food recovery organizations, and city/county departments about the law and food waste reduction strategies.
The innovative aspect of this pilot project is that most of these newly established or developing edible food recovery programs are managed by city recycling managers in city and county Public Works/Recycling departments in Los Angeles County, not typically public health departments. For example, in January 2018, Public Works established their edible food recovery program titled Food DROP (Food Donation and Recovery Outreach Program) whose mission it is to, provide resources for businesses operating in the County Unincorporated Communities so that they may (1) safely donate their excess edible food to fight hunger, and (2) reduce food waste in Los Angeles County.” Food DROP consults businesses with large quantities of surplus food on ways to reduce and donate their food to local nonprofit organizations. They do not, however, provide transportation for the food to travel from the business to the recipient organization. The City of Los Angeles Department of Sanitation and Environment (LASAN) established its RecycLA program, a public-private partnership that establishes a waste and recycling franchise system for all businesses and large multifamily residences in the City of Los Angeles. Within RecycLA, waste haulers (also known as RSPs RecycLA Service Providers”) are required to fund and subcontract with food rescue organizations to assist with rescuing edible surplus food from businesses in alignment with SB1383.
Other examples of edible food recovery programs lead by recycling/public works departments exist in many other cities in Los Angeles County and nationwide, and while they may reduce food waste and increase food donations, they do not necessarily align with public health standards that prioritize nutritious food. Per a November 2019 DPH report, Exploring the Feasibility of Implementing Healthy Food Pantries in Los Angeles County”, studies show that clients who obtain food from nonprofit organizations prefer receiving healthy foods, including fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins, which are also the most expensive foods. High caloric and inexpensive products such as soda, candy, and snack foods also ranked least preferred by clients. Food pantries serve as a localized effort to provide food and support directly to people who struggle with hunger and food insecurity. Their primary sources of food inventory are food banks and smaller food donors, such as local grocers, food retailers, manufacturers, universities, hospitals, and the hospitality industry. Additionally, food pantries may also purchase foods directly from food retailers to provide food inventory they cannot access through other sources.
In 2020, NPAP in DPH was awarded funding through the Productivity Investment Fund from the County's Quality and Productivity Commission to establish a pilot partnership with an existing food donation mobile application service that could match 50 donors with community-based organizations and provide the necessary transportation for a time span of 12 months, allowing for four pickups of donations a month, each donation limited to about 250 lbs. The project prioritized donors who were likely to donate lean proteins, prepared meals, and produce into the program while trying to ensure that high-caloric, low nutritional value foods were minimized in food donations were key in implementing the project through a health equity lens. To ensure equitable distribution of food, and because food within the charitable feeding system primarily serve populations that are directly impacted by food insecurity and diet related chronic disease, food businesses that expressed interest in receiving a subscription completed an online form providing information about themselves and were then screened to ensure they had an active health permit and a high likelihood of donating foods that would meet the program's nutritional standards (e.g., for fruits, vegetables, plant-based proteins, animal proteins, dairy, and whole grains). It was important to the project team and to the public-private partnership that the food redistribution program not only address food donation logistics but also nutrition security; that is, priority was given to food businesses that could provide recovered food that was healthy (i.e., of high quality or nutritional value). For example, if a food business only had non-nutritious food to donate, it was disqualified and excluded from the program. As a result of implementing these standards, most businesses prioritized produce and lean proteins in their donations; however, other food items such as baked goods and pastries were also made available and redistributed. Only food businesses that passed these nutrition standard screenings were connected to the food-recovery mobile app company and given the opportunity to complete transactions with eligible recipient community-based organizations.
The food redistribution program also ensured equity by distributing foods to geographic areas of highest need in the County. According to DPH's most recent food insecurity report, Food Insecurity in Los Angeles County – Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic” (FI Report”), in 2018, 26.8% or 516,000 Los Angeles County households with incomes less than 300% of the federal poverty level (FPL) experienced food insecurity, which includes households reporting low food security and very low food security. Of these, 203,000 households experienced very low food security. For services planning purposes, Los Angeles County is often divided by the County government into eight geographic areas due to its large geographical size (4,300 square miles); this allows for tailoring relevant public health and clinical services to each of these regions which often have differing, specific health and resource needs. These eight areas are referred to as Service Planning Areas (SPAs). Per the FI Report, the top three SPAs with the highest estimated number of food insecure individuals from highest to lowest were San Fernando, Metro, and South Bay SPAs. These three SPAs alone comprise nearly 52% of all food insecure individuals in Los Angeles County and though we do not have the exact number of people who benefitted directly from these food donations, these were the SPAs that received the highest quantity of donations through this pilot partnership.