This holiday season, a homegrown Utah nonprofit is reducing food waste to help families in need while taking care of the environment.
David Peterson founded the nonprofit Rescue Food in 2022. A 501(c)(3) association, Rescue Food works with local food manufacturers, distributors and wholesalers to salvage food that would otherwise be thrown away and distributes it to communities across Utah.
Each Monday, Rescue Food volunteers gather and categorize salvaged food, list inventory in an online form for anyone to submit and fulfill orders that are available for pickup the next day. While all the food is free, any monetary gifts go toward acquiring additional foodstuffs from salvage auctions.
“I actually felt really strongly divinely mandated to go in this direction,” Peterson said. “I had already started multiple businesses, and nonprofits are usually way more complicated. And I’m thinking, ‘I hate paperwork, I’m autistic, I don’t like people; nonprofits sound like a terrible, terrible idea.’ And God was like, ‘Well, look into it.’”
Peterson acquired a 501(c)(3) license through an IRS walkthrough and began Rescue Food with the intention of reducing food waste in his local community. Early efforts included small food rescues from local church events and educating the public on how to dehydrate, recook and ferment food to rescue it from going to waste.
Their projects didn’t stay small for long, however.
“Then, one day I was driving on I-15 and four times in the same day I got cut off by a truck from a produce wholesaler,” Peterson said. “On the back of the truck, there was a phone number that said ‘call this number.’ And by the fourth time at different places in Utah at different times of the day that this (had) happened, I’m like, ‘I might be clueless, but I can take a hint!’”
Peterson contacted the produce wholesaler and created a partnership in April 2023. If the wholesaler receives pallets of produce that will be overripe by the time they pass through warehouses and reach stores, they go to Rescue Food instead.
Prior to this arrangement, these excess fruits and vegetables — often in perfect condition — were a costly loss to wholesalers and ended up in landfills.
“(Our wholesaler) was spending tens of thousands of dollars paying landfills to throw away perfectly good food,” CJ Peterson, brother to David Peterson and longtime volunteer at Rescue Food, said. “It saves them money, it saves us money; so they're loving it, we love it, and it gives out.”
Rescue Food also acquires food from manufacturers when packaging is damaged, items need to be relabeled or product weight requirements are not met, all deterrents to major grocery sellers. In the beginning of November alone, Rescue Food received a shipment of 200,000 cupcakes that were rejected by grocery suppliers for being slightly underweight.
Local food banks also contribute to Rescue Food when they cannot accept products due to technical FDA limitations or run out of refrigerator space.
“This is, like, a dark side of food,” David Peterson said.
Food bank donations are required to be submitted in orders with a minimum of 26 pallets per tractor trailer load, but the banks can lack adequate refrigerator space to store everything in the shipment. This often results in food banks accepting massive donations, only to keep relatively few, high-demand items, David Peterson said.
“They’ll take a donation of 25 pallets of yogurt and 1 pallet of milk, and they will throw away 25 pallets of yogurt so they can get the pallet of milk,” David Peterson said. "Or, they’ll put two pallets of yogurt into their fridge and then all the rest goes to waste.”
In addition to rescuing and redistributing excess yogurt from food banks, Rescue Food has partnered with the Gene Ahlborn Lab of BYU’s Department of Nutrition, Dietetics, and Food Science to fund a study about the shelf life of yogurt and prove that it can last far longer than expiration dates advertise.
“The preliminary results were super exciting,” David Peterson said.
BYU students aren’t just helping Rescue Food in the laboratory; they’re also getting involved in hands-on volunteering with members of the Orem and Provo communities. Volunteers gather as individuals, for community service assignments, school projects and with family home evening groups to package goodie bags for local elementary school students, fulfill grocery orders and harvest produce from a warehouse garden.
“It was nearby and seemed interesting enough, so I figured I’d check it out,” Caleb Calderwood, a local student volunteer, said.
Ethan Winters, a senior student in mechanical engineering at BYU, also has experience volunteering with Rescue Food.
“I just wanted to serve, do something selfless, you know? I spend a lot of time focusing on myself, so I thought it would be good to serve,” he said.
Rescue Food recently listed volunteer opportunities on JustServe.org, a service project connection site created by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. On Nov. 4, Rescue Food broke its attendance record and hosted 93 volunteers in one evening, far exceeding their usual maximum of 40 people.
These volunteers don’t just provide food to Utah County, but people all across the state — and sometimes beyond.
“We have over 150 families every week now that come and get, in many cases, 50% of their food,” CJ Peterson said. “We have groups that are driving three or four hours out from the West Desert with a trailer to feed 30 families in their community.”
To achieve zero-waste, any food items or produce left undistributed or unclaimed in grocery orders are taken to Sanpete County. Molding produce is used either as compost or animal feed for Sanpete farms.
“Their food bank’s far enough off the grid in the second-poorest county in Utah that, when we first started working with them, sometimes all they would get as a donation was a pallet of lotion each week,” David Peterson said.
Now, Rescue Food operates as Sanpete Pantry’s only source of fresh produce. “We also send our broken pallets down there and they burn them as firewood to stay warm in the wintertime, so anything we have that’s available, we send along their way,” David Peterson said. “It’s been a really great partnership; they’ve actually sent stuff up to us that they have in excess.”
While the goal is to serve the Utah community, David Peterson says that he has been personally influenced by Rescue Food and the fruits of its impact.
“I so adore working with people at Rescue Foods,” David Peterson said. “I love that I feel like I’m making a difference, because all of this food would be going to waste.”
He said that a recent experience providing food to a large family whose father was recently laid-off was particularly impactful. “It was a little bit (of a) humbling experience, I guess, because it made me realize that this does have an impact on people’s lives and what I do has an impact.”