Less Food Waste, More Family Meals: Encouraging Shared Mealtime

Founded in January 2020, Pete’s Garden makes it easier for families to share wholesome meals together at home. Our food recovery operations recover high-quality, surplus prepared foods from Kansas City area caterers, restaurants, and food service operations. Volunteers package the food into family-sized meal portions in reusable take-home containers. The meals are distributed free through local social service organizations that serve families with children, such as Head Start and after-school programs. In 2024, Pete's Garden will recover and redirect over 150,000 pounds of prepared proteins and sides, the equivalent of 125,000 free, restaurant-quality meals.

In addition to food recovery, Pete’s Garden partners with high school culinary arts and family and consumer science classrooms to engage students in preparing take-home meals for families in their communities. This program, Kids Feeding Kids, provides educators with a standards-based food justice and culinary curriculum focused on increasing food access, reducing food insecurity, and raising awareness around the social and environmental impacts of food waste. For the 2024-25 school year, Kids Feeding Kids will be in approximately 40 Kansas and Missouri high schools with over 2,500 students participating to prepare over 20,000 free take-home meals.

The objective of this SARE project is to double the amount of good-to-eat prepared food donations from the Kansas City food service sector. We will work to validate ReFED data that suggests that just 0.15% of surplus food is currently being donated, and we will develop and implement an awareness-building campaign to encourage more food service operations to donate their surplus. We will develop a playbook to help other cities increase donations from the food service sector in order to redirect good food from landfills to family dinner tables.