Turning Rescued Food Into a Product Line, and Why That Is an Economic Question

Food rescue in this country runs on a fragile arrangement, and I have spent enough years around it to say that plainly. A nonprofit collects surplus that would otherwise be thrown out, moves it quickly, and gives it away. The operation is funded by grants and donations, which means the organisation spends a significant share of its energy raising the money that lets it do the work rather than doing more of the work.

A group of Philadelphia organisations is now testing a different arrangement, and I like that the test is deliberately small: one rescued ingredient, one product, one manufacturer, one institutional buyer.

The organisations involved

Sharing Excess is the rescue side. It was started in 2018 by Evan Ehlers, then a student at Drexel, after he realised he had meal swipes he was not going to use and began giving them away. Drexel’s own account of the origin and Drexel Magazine’s profile both record the same conclusion he drew from that first month of driving around the city: the shortage was not food, it was access.

The organisation now operates from the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market, redistributing surplus from grocers, restaurants, university dining halls and wholesalers across a national network of distribution sites. Philadelphia Magazine covered its scale in 2021, and CBS Philadelphia has reported on the operation since. PhillyVoice has also written about the pressure federal funding changes put on that model, which is precisely the exposure the current experiment is meant to reduce.

The Drexel Food Lab is the product development side. It is a culinary innovation lab run by Jonathan Deutsch, professor and vice chair of health sciences at Drexel and founding director of the university’s food innovation and entrepreneurship programmes. Deutsch is a past president of the Upcycled Food Foundation and was the inaugural James Beard Foundation Impact Fellow, leading a national curriculum effort on food waste reduction for chefs. The lab’s students have developed low cost methods for turning commonly donated produce and bakery surplus into shelf stable products.

The manufacturing question is being worked with FEAST, and the institutional buyer question with a team from Aramark working at Drexel. Our family foundation, the Gray Bradley Hayman Foundation, is funding the work that carries the ideas from student concept through product development, testing and manufacture toward a marketplace. I should say plainly that this is money my family is putting behind the idea, so I am not a neutral observer of whether it works.

What the loop is supposed to do

The sequence is short enough that I can state it in six words. Rescue it. Reimagine it. Make it. Sell it. Reinvest it. Repeat.

The material at the start of that loop has close to no economic value. Tomatoes past the point where a grocer will shelve them are a disposal cost. Under the current arrangement they become a donation, which is better than a landfill and still ends the story.

Under the loop, the same tomatoes become an input. Student work at the Food Lab produced a set of candidate products from that one ingredient: a tomato dressing, an Indian masala, a nutrient boosted pasta sauce, a tomato garden spread. The contemplated model is that proceeds from commercialising any of these support Sharing Excess, with a percentage returning to the Food Lab.

If that works, food rescue stops being purely an expense line and starts having a revenue line attached to it.

Why the institutional buyer is the hard part

I want to be clear about which step in that loop is difficult, because it is not the recipe.

Turning surplus produce into a good sauce is a solved problem. A culinary lab with capable students can do it in a term. Manufacturing it at a price point that works is harder but still an engineering and finance question with known answers.

The step that decides whether any of it matters is the last one: somebody has to buy the product at volume, repeatedly, on a contract.

That is why the Aramark and Drexel conversation is the one I am watching. A large food service operator running university dining has enormous purchasing power and a standing need for exactly this category of product. If an upcycled dressing becomes the house dressing in a campus dining operation, or gets a station takeover, or reaches a market shelf, the volume is real and the order repeats.

Without that, the product line is a demonstration. With it, the loop closes.

There is a second reason I think the institutional route is the right one to test first rather than a retail launch. A grocery shelf requires brand building, marketing spend and a fight for facings against companies with far deeper pockets, and it takes years to know whether it worked. An institutional contract is a decision made by a small number of people on the basis of cost, consistency and supply, and the answer arrives in months. For an experiment whose whole purpose is to find out quickly whether the economics hold, months beats years.

Philanthropy that builds a mechanism

The broader argument I am making here is about what philanthropic money is for.

The default model is straightforward and it works: raise money, spend it on the mission, raise more. It is also permanently precarious, because the organisation’s capacity is capped by its fundraising capacity and both are exposed to the same shocks. A change in federal funding priorities, a recession, a donor’s change of focus, and the operation contracts regardless of how much surplus food is still available to rescue.

The alternative is not that philanthropy stops giving. It is that some portion of it funds the part of a venture that no commercial investor will touch: the gap between a student concept and a product a manufacturer will make. That gap has no return profile, which is why it stays unfunded, and it is exactly where a foundation’s money does something a market cannot.

If the result generates revenue that flows back into the rescue operation, the philanthropic dollar has bought a mechanism rather than a year of operations.

Let me say what this is not. I am not arguing that nonprofits should become businesses, which is usually a polite way of asking underfunded organisations to solve their own funding problem. Sharing Excess still needs the donated food, the volunteers and the grants, and a revenue line from one product would not change that in any near term. My claim is narrower: that a portion of the sector’s money is better spent building something that pays part of the bill forever than on paying the whole bill once.

What would count as evidence

My honest position on all of this is that it is unproven. The products exist as student work. The manufacturing route is being explored. The institutional buyer conversation is a conversation.

What I would accept as evidence is narrow and checkable. One product manufactured at commercial scale. One institutional contract at a volume that repeats. A first cheque back to Sharing Excess from proceeds rather than from a grant. After that, a second ingredient going through the same route faster than the first one did, because the second time is where you find out whether you built a system or ran a project.

Federal and state agencies have spent years framing food waste as an environmental problem, which it is. What we are testing in Philadelphia is that it is also an unpriced input, and that pricing it correctly could fund the work of moving the rest of it to people who need it.

That is a considerably larger claim than a good sauce. And it starts, as these things tend to, with somebody looking at a case of tomatoes and asking why anybody is throwing them away.

The organisations involved

What the loop is supposed to do

Why the institutional buyer is the hard part

Philanthropy that builds a mechanism

What would count as evidence

Sources and references