Food rescue takes up shop in old Pizza Hut planned for demolition in Colorado mountain town

So, the plan has changed from the previous CBS News Colorado story about the "fast-food graveyard" of Silverthorne. Now instead of a Bird Call, the old Burger King is scheduled to be demolished by the Town of Silverthorne that purchased not only that building but the Pizza Hut next door. Why?

It's so the town can build out Stephens Way and the intersection of Highway 9, one of the choke points involved in the cluster of traffic near I-70 every single weekend in the winter thanks to ski traffic. 

"That roadway needs some widening, more capacity, we are working with local property owners and purchasing some property as well to make sure we can control that destiny." Ryan Hyland, Town Manager for Silverthorne said. "I think right now we are looking for grant funds and outside funding, it is a very expensive project, over the $15 million range, if we are going to do widening, roundabout, and also a new bridge."

In the meantime, while the city hunts down that $15 million, Silverthorne offered Cafe Food Rescue a residence inside the old Pizza Hut and the non-profit is now putting the outdated, but still structurally sound building to good use. 

"We take surplus food from grocery stores, restaurants, event centers, we use the community to help us distribute it," Diane Calvin, Executive Director of Cafe Food Rescue explained. "We distribute through community dinners and also food pantries."

Not quite a food bank, Cafe Food Rescue is more of a middleman to make sure food collected to go to food banks or other distribution locations can be stored and moved without getting tossed. Part of their specialty (aside from having the fridge and freezer space to hold that amount of food) is their licensing to repackage food.  

"There is a lot of prepared food that is in bulk, like in hotel pans, there is more than the community dinners can use," Calvin said. "So we are licensed to package that food and distribute it."

Plastic containers for food lay stacked and waiting for the otherwise wasted food that is still perfectly ok to eat, but often dumped in the trash. This is about making the most of the food in Summit County especially when there are so many people who go hungry. 

"We think there is more than 600,000 pounds of surplus food, that is still good for people to eat, thrown away in Summit County every year," Calvin said. "We think we can get half of that, about 300,000 pounds of food and that could cover half of the food insecurity in our community."

"We are helping the community to help itself."

Eventually, the city will kick Cafe Food Rescue out so they can bulldoze the building to make way for more road, but when that happens, an estimated few years from now, Hyland said he is interested in making sure the non-profit still has a place to operate in the community, wherever that is.