“Would it be possible for you to pick up on the weekend?”
This is a question we’ve heard often from our retail partners. As anyone who’s ever shopped on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon knows, weekends are busy times for grocery stores—which means there’s also lots of food available for donation.
However, because Food For Free’s Monday-through-Friday staff is already at capacity, we’ve been unable to fulfill this request—until now.
A new partnership
We recently launched a new collaboration with Tufts Food Rescue and BU’s Student Food Rescue. These two student-run food rescue groups will provide volunteers and vehicles to complete the rounds, while Food For Free will coordinate these pickups to ensure consistency and reliability for the stores, making these pickups something they can count on throughout the year.
We’ve rolled out weekend pickups for five of our existing partner stores: Whole Foods (River Street, Fresh Pond, Prospect Street, and Somerville stores) and Trader Joe’s Fresh Pond, and we couldn’t be happier with the result. Through this partnership, each organization is able to do more than we could do alone:
- the stores can donate more food
- the student groups can utilize their volunteers more effectively
- Food For Free is able to make sure that two more days’ worth of food is rescued without having to add to our staff or expenses
To us, that’s what partnership is all about.
