Los Angeles Daily News

Food Forward In North Hollywood Hopes To Rescue 33 Million Pounds Of Food With New Produce Depot

By Brenda Gazzar

June 20, 2019

Featured in the Los Angeles Daily News: coverage of Food Forward’s expansion plans to rescue 33 million pounds of surplus produce annually through a new wholesale depot. The piece positions our North Hollywood headquarters and Bell warehouse as the operational core of large-scale produce recovery in Southern California.

BELL — Richard Weinroth and Luis Yepiz fielded phone calls in a giant warehouse Wednesday that was stocked with dozens of pallets of potatoes, watermelons, plums and other fresh produce.

The employees of the North Hollywood-based nonprofit Food Forward had 100 donated pallets of surplus fruits and vegetables the day before at the organization’s new Produce Pit Stop in the city of Bell. By mid-morning Wednesday, they had moved out about two-thirds of the produce that came mainly from the Los Angeles Wholesale Produce Market to a variety of hunger relief agencies around Southern California.

“We’re so excited about this space; it’s going to change our world here,” said Weinroth, Food Forward’s director of programs, who donned an orange cap with the nonprofit’s name. “It’s going to change the world of food recovery, fresh produce recovery in L.A., and it will be a fun place to engage volunteers.”

Food Forward, established a decade ago, connects excess fruits and vegetables that otherwise would go to waste from backyard fruit trees, public orchards, farmers markets and L.A.’s wholesale produce market downtown with partner agencies serving the needy from Santa Barbara to the California-Mexico border.

Today, the nonprofit is formally opening this new 6,000-square-foot warehouse space – its first refrigeration and produce-storage area – with a ribbon-cutting ceremony.

The Produce Pit Stop, which sits on the edge of the Salvation Army’s Bell Shelter campus, is expected to increase the amount of excess produce Food Forward rescues by 50 percent to 33 million pounds a year by 2020. The depot will enable the nonprofit to create mixed loads of many kinds of produce to donate to entities, including food pantries, churches and after-school programs, more easily.

“(It) will be an oasis that will provide food nourishment to food deserts around Los Angeles and Southern California,” added Yepiz, Food Forward’s wholesale recovery program manager.

The Pit Stop, made possible in part by a $500,000 Food Waste Prevention and Rescue grant from CalRecycle, has a massive refrigerator that can store some 80 pallets or roughly 125,000 pounds of produce. On Wednesday, the cold fridge was stocked with pallets that included tomatoes, plums, corn, lettuce, peaches, pineapples, tangerines and baby lettuce as a technician fiddled with the thermostat.

Some of the produce Food Forward recovers has exterior blemishes, such as freckles on potatoes, that could make it harder to sell for a retailer but does not affect their quality, Weinroth explained. Some of the produce is obtained after a harvest comes in early and there is too much supply for a vendor to move out at one time.

“It’s really fantastic that so much of this stuff now finds a home with us,” Weinroth said. “We know that so much of this produce would have ended up in landfills and dumpsters when it’s perfectly good food.”

Valley Glen resident Rick Nahmias, founder and executive director of Food Forward, worked as a professional photographer before he created the nonprofit in 2009. He was driven to launch Food Forward after seeing a “huge amount of food going to waste” while people were going hungry at the peak of the Great Recession, he said.

It “covers two sides of the coin; it fights hunger and mitigates food waste, which contributes to climate change,” he said by phone this week.

The nonprofit went from recovering 100,000 pounds of fresh citrus in people’s backyards in its first year to “now, on a slow day, we recover 100,000 pounds” of fruits and vegetables through its three programs, the Backyard Harvest Recovery, the Farmers Market Recovery and the Wholesale Produce Recovery.

“Last year, we recovered 22 to 23 million pounds — and this is all fresh produce and it’s given out completely free of charge to the agencies that are our partners,” Nahmias, who was raised in Tarzana, said.

Having a storage facility with loading docks and massive refrigeration is a “game changer” for Food Forward’s Wholesale Produce Recovery program, which launched in 2014, he said.

Previously, the nonprofit had to refuse a number of loads it otherwise would have been able to take from vendors. The organization will now be able to temporarily hold some 150,000 pounds of produce at any one time at its new depot.

“Occasionally, we’d be able to park stuff in church parking lots overnight but it wasn’t secured, it wasn’t refrigerated,” Nahmias said. “We’ll (now) be able to make appointments with agencies to come to us to pick things up so we won’t constantly be on the road delivering things.”

William Hernandez, director of the Pacoima-based Valley Food Bank – which receives produce weekly from Food Forward – is thrilled with the opening of the Produce Pit Stop.

“We love it,” he said. “Any time there’s more fresh fruits, vegetables available, we think it’s a wonderful thing.”

Hernandez said his food bank has tried to move away from offering the families they support foods that are heavy on carbohydrates and preservatives. These families often go for less expensive food, such as pasta, rice or beans when they shop but that cannot constitute their total diet, he said.

“Especially young kids, if we can get them interested in eating more fruits and vegetables, we think that will establish eating patterns for their future,” he said.

For more information about Food Forward, how to volunteer or its new Produce Pit Stop, go to foodfoward.org.