COLORADO SPRINGS — We’ve all had that moment at the grocery store, carefully selecting produce to find just the right one for you. But what happens to the food you don’t pick? Chances are, it ends up in a landfill. But Colorado grocery stores and Care and Share Food Bank are trying to solve that.
In the United States right now, 40% of the food in our country goes to waste. And if we can combat that number down to zero, and that’s hard to do, but if we can combat that number down to zero, there wouldn’t be a need for food banks or food pantries, said CEO of Care and Share Nate Springer.
One of the ways they do that is by partnering with grocery stores like King Soopers, Safeway, and Albertsons with their Food Waste Reduction programs.
The thing is, these items that we’re donating, they’re still really good for consumption items, they’re just past an internal date where we can sell them, and we want to make sure they go to good homes where they can feed families, said Jessica Trowbridge with King Soopers.
These food waste reduction programs offer meat, cheese, dairy products, and produce to food banks. Trucks then pick those items up and bring them to distribution centers where volunteers check them, organize them, and send them off to families in need.
So of the 23 million pounds of food we send out the doors, about 3 million pounds of that a year is recovered food from grocery stores across the community. So it’s amazing, said Springer.
Care and Share says it sees the most demand for its services during the Summertime, mostly because kids are out of school.
