During the summer of 2018, I worked at Panera as a cashier and bakery backer. Our goods there were baked fresh every night and sold throughout the day in many forms. However, any leftovers could not be preserved and sold. In my time there, I noticed that we would collect our unsold bakery items – breads, pastries, scones, you name it – for charity. It was heartening to see the little service that could be done. 

I later learned that we could only collect and donate our food if a charity organisation contacted us earlier that day saying that they could pick up our goods that night before we closed. That meant that if nobody wanted to collect and donate our food, all our perfectly edible foods would go to waste. Aware of these stipulations, I gradually also began noticing this trend in other situations.

At grocery stores, for instance, people (myself included) tended to pick the fruits and vegetables that looked more attractive. And a collective bias towards “good-looking” produce meant that a lot of perfectly healthy “unattractive” produce went to waste due to lack of purchase and limited storage facilities. 

In my transition to college too I noticed a shift in demographics and human experiences and upon doing some research I found that food insecurity and hunger were much more rampant than I had anticipated. It was then I conceived my plan to help ease food insecurity and lower unhealthy eating habits among food insecure people in Atlanta by redirecting “unattractive” but edible and nutritious produce towards these communities, as well as promoting the establishment of storage facilities to save redirected surplus produce from food secure areas.