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SALT LAKE CITY — Everyone loves a good rescue story. There is one going on almost every day here in Utah that's a bit unusual but just as remarkable. It's called Grocery Rescue, and it's saving millions of pounds of nutritious food from a trip to the landfill.
It takes an assembly line of volunteers at the Salt Lake Mission to unload 2,000 of rescued fresh food. It's perishable foods that might not be sellable but are still safe and edible just hours after being pulled from the shelves and freezers of local grocery stores.
Walter Lofton is the operations manager at the Salt Lake Mission and he said, "Food rescue provides fruits, vegetables, all kinds of salads and everything, lots of nutritious meals."
"The lifetime of the product is quickly reducing and we need to get it from Point A to Point B without bringing it to the food bank but get it directly to a family or to a dinner table that night," says Ginette Bott, Chief Development Officer at the Utah Food Bank.
Six days of the week, the food bank's fleet of refrigerated trucks make multiple stops at dozens of stores to guarantee the product meets all federal food safety guidelines.
Bob Harmon is vice president for customers at the Harmons Grocery Store chain and he said, "The whole rescue is it's fresh, so the point is that we really needed them to be able to facilitate that so that we felt comfortable about donating the product."
Harmons felt comfortable enough to donate 2.1 million pounds of fresh food to the grocery rescue program last year.
"Really what we would do is just make sure that every day, we're actually looking at all of the codes and the best sell by dates," said Harmon as he walks through aisles of fresh food.
The program has cut Harmon's monthly waste in half: "That product is going to someone who really needs the food versus the landfill," said Harmon.
Participating Smith's Food and Drug stores in Utah have been involved in the grocery rescue program from the start and donated 1.2 million pounds in 2015.
Marsha Gilford is the vice president of public affairs for Smith's Food and Drug and she sized up the donation this way, "It's the food equivalent of about 2,500 meals a day in 2015. And we're very proud of that because we know some folks would be hungry if it wasn't for that food."
The program has been eye-opening for Smith's store managers.
"When we first rolled out the program I didn't realize, even as a store manager, how much we were throwing away every day and it literally can make you sick how much goes in the garbage," said Ginger Allen, the assistant store manager at the Smith's Marketplace at 3171 East and 3300 South in Salt Lake City.
"They realize this product is still viable, it's sellable, it's just run out of time. So, it really was for us, an easy partnership to form," said Bott.
It's been an easy and a very rewarding partnership that currently supplies over a third of the food distributed to pantries across the state.
"Collectively last year at the Utah Food Bank we distributed 37 million pounds of food throughout the state of Utah. Thirteen million pounds was, in fact, grocery rescue."
Harmon said his family's grocery store chain couldn't be prouder of this contribution to the communities where they grew up and expanded their business.
"It's very humbling, and it's a sense of pride to be able to help those people who without it would probably be in a very difficult position," Harmon said.
Gilford agrees.
"It's a very important program to us and we want to make certain that we're doing as much as we can to capture as much as we can and get it to the pantries," she said.
Pantries like the Salt Lake Mission's are placing a new emphasis on getting families to make healthier choices: "Basically, we want everybody to live longer and eat better," Lofton said.
Now, Lofton can make that happen with the almost daily deliveries of fresh produce and meats. No one has to leave the pantry hungry or unhealthy.
"And it doesn't have to be nasty. Healthy doesn't have to be nasty. It can be fantastic; it really can," Lofton. Email: solney@ksl.com
