Closing the Food Insecurity/Food Waste Gap with Food Connect
In 2020, when COVID shut down the San Francisco Unified School District, one unfortunate side effect was kids going hungry. Students who relied on school meals were left to fend for themselves, often lacking access to other food—and Megha Kulshreshtha took note. Having grown up with the pain points of low income and lack of transportation herself, she knew what the school closures meant, and was ready to help. Her nonprofit, Food Connect, bridges the gap between surplus food and hunger through collaboration and technology. Based in Philadelphia with multiple locations across the country, Food Connect has helped distribute over 3 million on-demand meals, and was ready to apply resources and experience in the Bay Area. We chatted with CEO and founder Kulshreshtha to get the good news of how technology and collaboration are helping solve hunger problems.
Born from real-life experience
Before founding Food Connect, Kulshreshtha worked in data, technology and process solutions, starting her career as a data analyst and then as a portfolio analyst for U.S. equities at Aberdeen Asset Management. That technical background gave her tools to start streamlining inefficiencies in the hunger relief space—but the heart of her work with Food Connect started beating long before.
“My parents came into this country with three kids and $40 in their pocket,” she says. “And a lot of the programs that Food Connect now services were programs that would have been nice for our family and things like food access—being able to have transportation when we needed it. Those are all pain points that my family and I experienced firsthand.”
Being able to support people when they need it is important to Kulshreshtha, who says the world has given her so many blessings. “Just being able to extend that when people need support in times of vulnerability or challenges—we all face those and we're not all that different when you really look at the core elements,” she says.
Listening to the community for sustainable solutions
The transition to applying her background to hunger relief started organically for Kulshreshtha, who would see people who needed food on her way to and from work. “I never understood why restaurants in the evenings after their shift… they're throwing all that food out,” she says. “So that never made sense to me.”
She began talking to restaurants, and talking to recipients—but before food rescue became more common, people were often scared to donate because of old policies that made it take too long to get the food to people in need.
Food Rescue in California, photo credit @Food Connect Group
“I think part of it was just me kind of rolling up my sleeves and saying, ‘I can't keep walking past this problem every day. I am just going to start driving and dropping off these meals and we'll figure the rest out,’” Kulshreshtha says.
That was where Kulshreshtha tapped into her background, matching technology to the logistics and support so donations can now be made much more quickly. “We live in a very abundant world,” she says. “And it's a shame sometimes that people who need it can't always access those resources. So that's where we come in. We help bridge some of those gaps.”
But to keep work like that sustainable requires collaboration. The key is paying attention to the real needs—and applying technology and collaboration to make more impact. “We really try to listen to what the recipients need and we really try to meet them where they are,” Kulshreshtha says. “So that means both with technology and also physically providing services where they physically are. So those are all important components of what brought me to this work initially.”
As Food Connect expands (they recently also launched in Kansas City in October 2023), they’re preparing to roll out a new partner portal, which will allow their food programs to schedule and manage all of their deliveries and network off of their computer. She emphasizes that allowing the beneficiaries of the food to be able to voice their own needs on their terms is important, and says, “It really puts the autonomy in the hands of the service sites that are receiving the food.”
Food Connect also has expanded services in the Food as Medicine space, partnering with regional healthcare organizations facing growing patient populations suffering from chronic, diet-related illnesses like diabetes.
Food Rescue Market in California, photo credit @Food Connect Group
Caring for self, caring for others—and caring for your organization
Speaking of voicing needs, anyone who works in the nonprofit world—or has a living, bleeding heart, for that matter—knows how easy it is to get singed by burnout. The hunger relief space can feel demoralizing, Kulshreshtha admits.
“I think one of the greatest learning curves for me and for our team has been how we stay dialed in and tune out the noise,” she says. “Because there is plenty to say about what's not going right. There is no shortage. So I think for us, I knew no matter what's happening for myself, I knew I wanted to be someone that was putting something positive into the world, even if it's our little part in it. I know all of the things I cannot control, but there's a small handful of things that I can control.”
Part of that means taking care of her team, creating a culture of celebrating successes, caring for each other and sharing their personal lives. And importantly, it means advocating for them and reaching out to funders to support their work in a sustainable way. She says, “We have a great time off policy. We have great benefits. I believe very strongly that if you want people to work on the world's toughest problems, take care of them when they're doing that.”
In the end, Kulshreshtha says she aims to keep herself and her team thinking “from a place, not from fear, but from abundance. Asking questions like ‘Hey, what's possible in this space? How can we create new systems that allow people to thrive and ultimately break the cycle of hunger and food insecurity?’ ”
Chase Center Food Recovery Hub, photo credit @Food Connect Group
Turns out it's a climate solution too!
Reducing food waste has significant potential to impact our ongoing climate issues. According to Project Drawdown’s research on climate solutions, “roughly one-third of the world’s food is never eaten.” Working to reduce food loss and waste could avoid 88.5-102.2 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions by 2050. That is a significant dent in the climate emission equation.
Megha and Food Connect Group started with the human-level connection, helping others find basic physical needs, and evolved it to help humans thrive. But we all benefit from their work. Scaling the connections between food waste and food needs is critical for all our futures. This is a tangible solution, one that directly impacts individual lives.
All of Food Connect growth has come organically through referrals and happy partners, it seems like that’s working. To read more good news from partners who appreciate this work, check out Food Connect online.
Booker T Feeding Event with donations from Fruit Guys, photo credit @Food Connect Group
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