How Philadelphia nonprofit Sharing Excess is feeding the community and eliminating food waste
Hunger is often described as one of the world's dumbest problems, particularly when one considers all the food that goes to waste. But now, one man's hustle is creating change in the Delaware Valley and beyond.
The Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market in Southwest Philly is one of the largest produce markets in the mid-Atlantic region. It's essentially a refrigerator the size of 14 football fields, where mostly restaurants and grocery stores go to buy their fruits and veggies. But on any given day, Evan Ehlers is there picking up donations.
"Everyday, we'll rescue between 30,000 to 50,000 pounds of food just from this one building alone," Ehlers said. "We take whatever food they aren't able to sell, and we redistribute it out to the community before that food goes to waste."
That's the mission of his nonprofit Sharing Excess. Headquartered right at the market, volunteers with Sharing Excess save the produce that vendors can't sell and would otherwise trash due to imperfections, or simply because of a surplus in supply.
"It's firm, it's great, I would eat this right now, I'm going to save that one," volunteer Abbe Stern says.
Stern knows the value of this produce. She's also the Food Pharmacy Manager at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. She'll use what she saves at Sharing Excess to help feed patients in need.
"I'm going to be able to keep all the good, discard all the bad, and all of that good food makes its way back into the community," she said.
Sharing Excess rescues and distributes free food to hundreds of nonprofits in the Philadelphia region, in turn feeding hundreds of thousands of people.
"This is something that I started just on a good feeling and something that I thought was right to do with leftover food that I had in my dining account," Ehlers recalled.
CBS News Philadelphia was there in 2019 when Ehler just got Sharing Excess off the ground at Drexel University. At that time, he was simply donating extra food from his meal plan. Now, the nonprofit is set up in 33 states and has made its first international shipment in Guatemala.
On this day, Ehlers showed CBS News Philadelphia crates of green bananas that would have otherwise been thrown away if not for Sharing Excess.
"It's one of the world's dumbest problems," he says. "We still have food waste, and we have people hungry."
To date, Sharing Excess has saved more than 85 million pounds of food.
The environmental impact is also great. Food waste contributes to global greenhouse gases. Ehlers said Sharing Excess has cut the organic waste of the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market by 60%. On top of that, he says the nonprofit's work has helped saved the vendors there more than a $1 million in disposal fees.
But Ehlers said it takes a lot of volunteers to get the job done. Food insecurity gets even greater around the holidays, and Thanksgiving is just two weeks away. Ehlers said Sharing Excess needs more volunteers to help save and sort food.