FIND Food Bank partners with local grocery stores to rescue food and eliminate greenhouse gas emissions

FIND Food Bank sources food from local, statewide, and national sources. These partnerships are essential to reduce food waste and get vital nutrition into the hands of the people that need it most.

News Channel 3’s Caitlin Thropay explains the partnership FIND has with many local grocery stores.

“We’ve been food rescuing for 38 years," director of community impact at FIND Food Bank Lorena Marroquin told News Channel 3.

FIND Food Bank is the largest food rescue and hunger-relief organization in the desert.

FIND partners with 54 grocery stores like Ralphs.

“We donate food that is unsellable to the FIND Food Bank and they make sure that it gets into the hands of those that need it most,” store manager of the Ralphs grocery store in Indio Bob Dimesa said.

FIND picks up the nutritious food from Ralphs five days a week and in a matter of days even hours it’s back in the community through FIND’s many distribution sites.

“This location in Indio in 2020 donated 270,000 pounds of food to our local food bank that equals 230,000 meals for the local community,” Dimesa shared.

Not only does food rescuing help people in need but it also helps our planet.

“The fact that 40 percent of all food that’s produced in the United States goes to waste while one in five people throughout the Coachella Valley may not know where their next meal is coming from,” Dimesa said.

All that waste accounts for 882 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions every year according to https://www.rts.com/resources/guides/food-waste-america/

“In 2020 we [FIND Food Bank] rescued 9.7 million pounds of food,” Marroquin said.

This prevented the release of about 747,000 pounds of the greenhouse gas methane from landfills to go into our atmosphere.

“Through Kroger and our partnership with FIND Food Bank we hope to end hunger and waste in our community by the year 2025,” Dimesa said.

To learn more about FIND Food Bank and their food rescue program visit: https://www.findfoodbank.org/