Helping Hungry Neighbors Through CSR

SI Nonprofit Affiliate Member Sharing Excess lets for-profit businesses reduce food insecurity in their communities while improving their own performance. It’s a perfect example of the power of CSR.

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Evan Ehlers, founder and executive director of the innovative nonprofit Sharing Excess, sums up the situation beautifully:

“It’s like going from the dumbest problem ever to the smartest solution you can have.”

The dumb problem Ehlers refers to is food waste in America. In a country where tens of millions of people experience food insecurity, it’s absurd how much food simply gets thrown away.

The smart solution? That’s what Sharing Excess is focused on delivering. The organization partners with businesses in the food industry — from restaurants and supermarkets to large food wholesalers — giving them a mechanism, as well as social and financial incentives, to get excess food into the hands of people who really need it.

It’s an effort that’s currently helping to feed 10 million people per year in communities across the country. It’s also a model that aligns perfectly with the mission of the Satell Institute (which, as we’ll see, played a role in jumpstarting Sharing Excess): For-profit businesses can — and should — do well and do good at the same time.

From Meal Cards to Major Impact

Sharing Excess has a storybook origin story. In 2016, Ehlers, then a student at Drexel University, realized he had swipes on his meal card that he wouldn’t be able to use before the semester ended. But rather than simply let the credits expire, he used them to buy dozens of meals in Drexel’s cafeterias, stacking them up in to-go boxes. Then he drove around in his grandmother’s car and gave the meals to people in need around Philadelphia.

In doing so — and in looking more deeply into the issue afterwards — he began to see the inefficiency of food distribution in America.

“I started to do my research and found out that about 40 percent of the food that we produce in this country goes to waste,” he says. “And we have over 40 million Americans who experience hunger. I guess another way of thinking about it is — we’re throwing away 10 times the amount of food that we need to feed everybody who’s hungry in this country.”

Ehlers was an entrepreneurship student at Drexel — in fact, he was the first person admitted to the university’s then-new program in 2014 — and the paradox of food access got his mind working. What if there was a way to get that excess food — most of which never even makes it into people’s homes — into the hands and stomachs of people who needed it?

The idea for Sharing Excess was born. Early on, the organization kept things simple, putting an emphasis on unused student meal swipes.

Today, it has grown enormously and is trying to attack the problem of food distribution and access at scale. The outfit operates inside some of the largest produce markets in America, rescuing high volumes of surplus food and redistributing it to hundreds of food banks and organizations. It does retail rescue, sending vans to pick up food from grocery stores like Trader Joe’s. Its widest-spread program is Direct Link, in which it moves full truckloads of excess food from food distributors across the country to the nearest food bank.

How Business — and Communities — Benefit

For the food businesses it partners with, Sharing Excess is a win-win-win.

For starters, the organization reduces the friction of donating excess food. “Imagine being Dole, and you have four truckloads of excess bananas that ripened a little too fast and now they’re going to become waste unless you donate them,” says Ehlers. “Imagine trying to get on the phone and call food banks. Is this the right number? How long is a business going to do that until they just give up and throw the food away?

“It’s not that food businesses were never donating before,” he continues. “It just wasn’t maximized. We take a business like Dole and we say, we’ll take 100 percent of your food donations and we’ll find a home for them, no matter what.”

That’s a win for business, as are the tax deductions and credits that companies get from donating food. Then there’s the satisfaction — and concrete benefits — that companies get from giving back. The stronger a community is, the more likely a business is to do well.

“We talk about wanting to break this cycle of poverty. We need to give people a chance,” says Ehlers. “We need to give people the resources they need to survive and to think beyond their day-to-day survival. Because when you’re only thinking about your own survival, your capacity to give, your capacity for entrepreneurship, your capacity for leadership is very limited.”

The Role of the Satell Institute

People in business who become familiar with Sharing Excess fall in love with its approach. That includes founding SI member Jim Dever, Bank of America’s Greater Philadelphia President, who met Ehlers at a Satell Institute conference several years ago. Not only does Bank of America now offer financial and organizational support to Sharing Excess, but Dever proactively asked to join the board.

“I first met Evan at a Satell Institute CEO Conference while he was a student at Drexel,” Dever says. “I was blown away. His command of food waste issues, ability to rescue food waste and increase food accessibility, and vision to scale Sharing Excess was unparalleled then and remains so today.”

For Ehlers, the Satell Institute connection remains vital and vivid. “When I got to know the Satell Institute, it was like my two favorite worlds intersecting. It’s impact and giving back. It’s business and leadership. And it wasn’t just talk. Real connections are being made.”

Ehlers says Sharing Excess’s focus is now on growing even larger. Food insecurity is on the rise, and so, with the help of philanthropy, the organization is hoping to expand even more. It opened an operations center in Detroit not long ago, and it’s pushing to get into as many produce markets as it can on the East Coast and, eventually, the West Coast.

Making that happen requires as much support from business and philanthropy as possible. But Ehlers believes the efforts can be worth it.

“We’re creating this highly scalable model for people that have the means to give back, giving them an opportunity to help solve one of the most important problems of our generation,” he says. “Because it is within our grasp to solve world hunger.”