About Us

Food Recovery Network (FRN) unites students at colleges and universities to fight food waste and hunger by recovering surplus perishable food from their campuses and surrounding communities that would otherwise go to waste and donating it to people in need.

The Problem

Over 68 billion pounds of food are wasted every year. In the same year 1 in 7 Americans--48.3 million people--struggle with hunger.

The Solution

The Food Recovery Network collects wasted food from dining halls and brings it to homeless shelters, food banks, and other nonprofits in the surrounding communities. Student volunteers transport the food from dining halls to shelters nightly. This means that the cost per meal is negligible: for only ten cents, FRN can provide a meal that would have been wasted to someone in need.

Reducing food waste and providing for our neighbors makes each community that FRN operates in stronger and more supportive. It also helps the environment by helping to close the loop on food waste, America's second largest waste stream.

The History

The Food Recovery Network was founded in September 2011 at the University of Maryland, College Park. It has already donated over 50,000 meals which would otherwise have gone to waste, valued at over $250,000. In January 2012, FRN started a chapter at Brown University. These two chapters then joined with Bare Abundance at University of California, Berkeley, and Food Rescue at Pomona College to form the new National Food Recovery Network.

FRN is now becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and is helping students start new chapters at over a dozen other universities. It is the proud winner of Ashoka Youth Venture’s Banking on Youth Competition. This April, FRN also took the grand prize in the Kevin Bacon Do Good Challenge, at UMD. Various chapters have also received seed funding from Pitch Dingman, Sodexo, a Strauss Grant and Brown Student Agencies.

Learn more about the history of FRN under Our Story.