Move for Hunger Interview

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And the topic of today is how do we create sustainable ways to fight world hunger? And to understand more about that, we have invited Adam Lowy, the founder and executive director of Move for Hunger. So I say Welcome, Adam, to this interview.

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Thank you so much for having me. Can we if we can go directly into the core ideas that we’re talking about today, what would you say is the problem that you’re trying to solve?

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The fact of the matter is there are a lot of people in this world that do not have enough to eat when you look at the United States alone. One of the wealthiest nations, the land of opportunity, if you will, you know, pre covid, there were thirty seven million Americans that didn’t have enough to eat just in this country alone. And at the same time, 40 percent of the food we’re producing in the United States ends up in landfills. A third of the food produced globally goes to waste. So there is really just this disproportionate amount of food being thrown away for various reasons within the supply chain while so many people are struggling to feed themselves. And I feel like these two issues kind of have a fair amount of crossover and definitely both need to be looked at if we’re going to solve food insecurity.

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Ok, thank you. That paints the picture you’re saying in a country like America, thirty seven million are having issues with food and one third goes to waste in the system. So I see why that is a big problem. So help us then to understand, how does Move for hunger fit into that picture to kind of help solve this problem.

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Yeah, so, you know, when I founded Move for Hunger 11 years ago, I really didn’t know anything about hunger or food waste. My family’s in a moving company in New Jersey for about one hundred years. My great grandfather started it. So I grew up working on a moving truck because that’s what you do when dad owns the moving company. And what we found was when people moved, whether in the US or elsewhere, people threw away a whole bunch of stuff: food, clothing, furniture. I’m sure if you’ve moved, you’ve thrown a couple things away. But what always gets left behind or thrown in the trash or a question that always came up during moving day was like, what should I do with all this food that’s left in my pantry? And, you know, we kind of started asking people if they wanted to donate their food. When they moved, the moving company was there anyway. So there was no extra work for them and for the customer it was another service we could provide to them. So it felt like a nice thing to

do. And that’s really all it was meant to be, was, hey, we’re trying to solve this problem that the customer is facing. And in a month from doing nothing more than asking a very simple question, we collected three hundred pounds of food and I brought that food to our local food pantry, which was right down the road.

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And I’d never been to a food bank before. I don’t know if you visit a food bank, but for me it was my first time. And, you know, I’ve lived here my entire life. And they told me that there are one hundred and forty thousand people just in my county that didn’t have enough to eat. And I’m from Monmouth County, New Jersey. I’m a Bruce Springsteen and the Jersey Shore and Jon Bon Jovi. And when you look around, you don’t see a ton of poverty, you don’t see a lot of homelessness, you don’t see a lot of hunger. You don’t see a lot of the stereotypical traits that you think somebody that is needing food has. That was in my community. However, here it was, you know, more than one hundred thousand people struggling in a wealthy county in the United States. And as I did more research, I learned that this wasn’t just a problem plaguing my community. It was a problem plaguing every community, not just in the US, but globally. The people that are struggling with food insecurity are our friends, our neighbors, our family members. It’s people that are facing just insurmountable challenges, making decisions of whether to pay their rent or put food on the table for their family or purchase medications or feed their kids. And sometimes when the kids are in school, that’s the only meal from some of these school meal programs.

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It’s the only meal they’ll be eating during the day. And then summer comes and school’s out and kids struggle through the summer months as well. So when you think about food insecurity, it really is a symptom of a larger problem which is poverty. And I think at least here in the US, we’ve seen that the divide between those who have and have not really increased. I think you can apply that narrative to many countries across the world at this point. I mean, it’s not a matter of one political party taking power. It’s really a matter of how we think of how we plan out a society where we can lift people out of poverty and the food banks have a role to play, but they can’t do it alone. It really does need to be a collaborative effort. So that’s a long way of me saying we saw this food getting wasted. When people are moving, people are throwing it away. We figured out a way to solve this problem. And I figured, hey, if my family’s small moving company could feed three hundred people in a month from doing their jobs, what happens if we get others involved? And today we’ve trained more than one thousand professional moving companies across the US and Canada to make food recovery a core part of the way they do business.

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Every single one of their customers and every estimate is getting educated about the local hunger need. We provide those hunger statistics so they can learn because education is power? I didn’t know that people in my community were struggling and when I did learn that, it propelled me to act. And, well, I don’t expect everyone to quit their jobs and start a nonprofit because of it. I do expect people to be able to contribute in an easy, free, meaningful way to help fight hunger in their communities where they live collectively. Over the past eleven years, we’ve been able to feed more than 17 million people. At this point, we’ve expanded beyond moving companies, which I can talk about really. When you think about sustainability, which I know is kind of what you led off with here, really what we want to be thinking about is not how we pick up food one time or how we give someone a meal one time. But how do we change the way business and society function so that we’re not wasting food, so that we’re feeding people, so we’re creating those win win win scenarios. So ultimately, if my organization shuts down or I decide to go do something else in a couple of years, we still have the solution in place and that’s what really move for hunger is all about.

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It’s an inspirational story for sure, being in your family kind of business, and then you just took it in a different direction to help solve the issue of poverty. So let me see if I understand the core of it. What you really are focusing on is to.

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Reach out to moving companies that are already doing moving and just educate them, hey, you can also contribute in this way with helping people with food. I guess they would be happy to kind of join that, since you already have reached out to so many people who said, yes, we’ve created another service that these companies can offer to their customers, that will really resonate.

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I mean, people want to work with socially responsible businesses. We know that the data shows that consumers are begging for companies to be doing good for their communities, for their environment. And this is one easy way the movers can do this. And we’ve expanded beyond moving companies to work with relocation management companies and corporate housing providers and multi-family apartment communities. And ultimately, what we found is at the end of the day, a lot of this is about transportation. When you think about the food that’s getting wasted. It’s a logistics problem whether the food is going to waste on the farm. Right. Because you don’t have enough hands or trucks to get it off and food’s going to waste there. Or when you go to the grocery store, you ever notice that you only see the shiny apples on display, you never see the apples or the little dent in it because that food doesn’t last on the shelf very long. They throw that away. Or if you buy something that’s prepackaged, maybe

you’re buying green beans or asparagus. Everything is the same size. No fruits and vegetables don’t all grow the same size. So they can fit into that arbitrary packaging. You know, you’re trimming in some cases a third of those vegetables. So they will fit in that packaging. And then you think about the labels on that package. That’s a Best Buy used by sell by expires on, which really is just another way to get people to buy more as it goes down. I mean, you can tell when your food is going to waste. And a lot of times those dates are a little bit more arbitrary than they need to be.

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So there’s a lot of exciting things I’d say happening in the food waste space. There’s a great organization called ReFED that basically compiles a ton of data on food waste as well, where we happen to get a lot of our statistics, too. But when you take in all these operators, whether it be moving companies or furniture rental companies in the case that we’re working with on the multifamily side, these are transportation resources. And they weren’t being leveraged in a way that could do good. They were being leveraged for business purposes, which is fine, which is great. That’s how businesses are supposed to function. Right. You go out, you get you ask your customer for money and you provide a service. Now, if you can provide that same service and also provide a tangible benefit to society, in this case, rescuing food and delivering it to the local food bank, that’s that’s a bonus. Like, why wouldn’t you want to do that? Why wouldn’t your customer want to do that? Why wouldn’t your team want to feel good about your company in your culture, doing a good thing for the community and for the planet? So, you know, that’s really kind of been the way that we’ve thought about it. And now that we have all these transportation resources, you know, thousands upon thousands of trucks within our network, we found other ways to leverage them from a food recovery standpoint. A lot of that’s happened just during covid-19. If you did see the images of crops rotting in the fields on the news, we pivoted a little bit to determine what food is available.

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Can we get a truck to this farm to pick up food that has to travel a short distance? We’ve done quite a bit of that. Now, can we talk to big companies that maybe overorder pre pandemic? Because no one saw this thing coming and then all this food was going to go to waste when it hit its expiration date? We’ve been able to recover that food pallets, truckloads of food at a time from some of the biggest CPG companies out there and make sure gets to food bank before it gets to landfill, because this food is good and these food banks are seeing demand five, 10, 15 times that like they’ve never seen before. In fact, we’re expecting the United States to see seventeen more million Americans go hungry as a result of covid-19, which means the food banks are already stressed before. But the system was not designed to support this many people. So it really does come down to organizations like ours collaborating with food banks and pantries and gleaning organizations and grocers and food distributors and farmers and really the entire food supply chain. I mentioned the supply chain is inefficient, which is why we see fit, why we see waste. We need to find a better way to think about how we grow, how we distribute and how we purchase food. Because if we can think of it that way, we’re not going to see nearly as much food go to waste.

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And your air, your excitement around what we can do, it really says it all. So what would you say then is?

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Now, you’re already connected towards quite many trucks and transportation vehicles that can help you. So if you look at all of the waste that is being wasted, how much can you help rescue and how much is left there in the system? Just America, because I guess you’re creating a system that the whole of America could use and then other countries could use this. So how much of that total waste have are still there, too, to do something about.

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So remember, the US is worse than everyone else, right? Globally, it’s a third of the way that a third of the food that is produced goes to waste. And the US, it’s 40 percent. So we’re not doing so hot here to begin with. But what Move for hunger is tackling is only a piece of that food waste, right? We can’t, we can’t take it all. We don’t have a lot of refrigerated trucks within our network and a lot of food is perishable. That goes to waste. There are a lot of really great organizations that are tackling this problem from multiple angles. And that’s what needs to happen. And ultimately, they’re getting better. Data will be able to drive these numbers down, will also probably drive revenues up for the companies that are producing or distributing food. So prime example, not something that we touch, but restaurants in our restaurants order a ton of food and they waste a lot of food. But if you’re finding ways to minimize the amount of food waste, whether it be looking at what you’re ordering is what your portion sizes are, just kind of two pieces. Looking at that right away, if you can find ways to eliminate that waste, your revenue goes up. So it is inefficient. We’re throwing money away literally. And it’s not just restaurants, it’s consumers in the home. How often have you thought of pepper chopped up half of that pepper and then seeing the other half of that pepper go to waste? Just because you know what? I was going to make that other meal this week and I just didn’t get around to it now.

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I mean, like, logically, you probably should freeze it, but something else came up. So, you know, I think I think there are ways to retrain us as a society how not to waste food or how to compost food. The goal is just not to get that food to landfill. The goal is if we can reduce the amount of food that is going to landfill, we will reduce the

amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are warming this planet. And ultimately, if we can find ways to get some of this food that’s able to be donated to food banks, we can feed more people and tackle that food insecurity issue at the same time. So these are intersecting issues and there’s a lot that can be done kind of on both sides of the equation. But it’s going well. I’m very proud of the work that we’ve done this year. We’re on track to deliver more food to food banks than we ever had before in our 11 years. But again, we’re just one piece of this overall equation.

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If you could help people to understand what you would want people to do after hearing this interview?

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Yeah, I mean, there’s a number of ways that people can get involved with for hunger, not just people, but companies. So at least within the US and Canada, if you work with any of our one thousand plus moving companies, you can donate your food when you move. If you live in one of our fifteen hundred plus apartment communities that we’re working with, you can donate your food. Any move. If you want to organize a food drive in your community, we will help you with the flyers, the marketing, and then if you collect enough food, we’ll actually send a truck to pick that up and bring it to your local food bank. Free of charge is no cost. We organize thousands of food drives a year. We would love to get you engaged that way. You can also find a ton of information on our website to educate yourself about the issues of hunger and food waste and really is staggering when you start kind of like diving down that rabbit hole of statistics of who is hungry. It really is a diverse population of people that are struggling, not just, again, the stereotypical homeless person that people tend to think of. When you think of hunger there, we also have a number of social media infographics that you can share because, again, knowledge is power. The more you know, the more you’re willing to accept that it’s not just enough to educate yourself, but then take that knowledge and help educate others to get them interested and engaged within these issues. And then, like any nonprofit, you can make a donation. Any donation is great. A twenty five dollar donation to our cause helps us feed over 60 people. So the money does go far. We’re not one of these multimillion dollar organizations, although we would love to be. We do a lot with a lean team and an incredible network. We’re on track to deliver more than four million pounds of food this year alone to food banks. And we can’t do that without the support of individuals.

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Personally, I have not heard about the move for hunger before. I don’t know if that even exists in the country I live in, which is Sweden.

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I just moved myself and I did throw quite much food and I was like, now you say it. It makes so much sense. I’m not connected. People are hungry. I’m throwing away food that has not come into my mind. I just want to get that shit done because I’m stressed. Right. So just being aware of that and that, it’s quite easy with the possibilities to, hey, you’re saying people would kind of go into an app and like, I want someone to pick up my food. Is it that easy for people to actually donate to actual food?

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So within the US and Canada where we currently operate, you can go and click on our website and click, find a mover. And if you hire any of those movers to move you, they’re there anyway, so they’ll pick it up as part of the process. But if you live in an apartment and you’re moving yourself like maybe you are in your scenario. We have fifteen hundred apartment communities, three hundred thousand apartment units that we’re currently working with. And what happens is when residents are moving out, they give their notice, they receive a move from hunger, recyclable paper, food collection that they can put their non perishables in there. And then once a month we send one of our transportation partners to pick that food up from the property and deliver it back to local food banks. So, again, all the food stays within the community. For people like you, we’re giving you that awareness and that donation receptacle will bring in the food drive into your living room. We’re trying to make it as easy as possible for you to take action. There’s no cost for you to participate. And at the end of the day, people get to eat. So again, trying to create that win win win scenario.

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It sure is a win win and people like me really need it, or at least I need it, so.

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So I want to end this interview by asking, is there I’m actually hearing a baby dressed up in the background as my seven month old baby who’s here as well.

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Adorable. Adorable, right. She’s adorable. So my question is, is there anything extra important that you would like for more people to understand about the culture that you’re trying to solve as an ending point in this interview?

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I would say seek out the knowledge. You know, there are a number of resources, including on Food for Hungry Dog, where you can learn more about these issues. And when you think about tackling any problem, not just hunger and food waste like we’re doing, think about the resources that are available. Not every company or individual is equipped to tackle every problem, but in this case, from a transportation perspective, we were able to align these

resources to tackle, in this case, food waste. And I think you can find the same as you go through different industries and different companies. What is available and how can you leverage it for good? And I think if more companies begin to think that way, our world is going to be a much better place.

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You know, it’s a good message when someone answers it and the world is going to be a better place.

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We’re trying, right? That’s the hope.

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Thank you very much for taking the time to clarify that you actually exist. I didn’t even know about those kinds of solutions existing. So I’m thank you for all the work.

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Thank you for having us. And I hope some of your listeners will get involved.

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