 Good morning my friends, I am on my bike obviously and I'm going to meet my friend Hayden who runs an incredible organization here in Boulder called Boulder Food Rescue. And what they do is they rescue food from grocery stores and then they distribute it to people in need all across Boulder and they do it on bikes. So Boulder Food Rescue is a nonprofit that's been around for about eight years and what we do is try to create a more just and less wasteful food system. So we pick up food that would otherwise be discarded even though it's perfectly good and we're focused on produce healthy fruits and vegetables and we take it directly to 38 different sites around Boulder. Some of those are food pantry shelters, places where you would think you would receive food but about two-thirds and kind of our main focus is what we call no-cost grocery programs. So we take it directly to a low-income housing site or preschool or daycare where residents at those sites can distribute the food amongst themselves, decentralizes food rescue, it cuts down on barriers to accessing food and it involves people in the process. So that's where we're going today and excited to show you. How did this all start? It started with a group of friends who were learning about food waste and got really upset and we wanted to do something about it and we saw that there was so much healthy nourishing fresh produce just going to waste for really kind of weird reasons and we wanted to say let's let's let's get grocery stores to donate that food instead of throwing it away and take it to people that don't have access to it. So it was a really simple idea. It started with one grocery store, one pickup, one day a week and then it boomed really quickly. So now we pick up from eight grocery stores, one to two times a day at each one, seven days a week. We have about 12 shifts a day every day of the week and we distribute about 1500 pounds of food. So 150 volunteers are out there biking food around and it's it's a really cool way to both get on a bike to contribute actively to the distribution of food out of the waste stream into the hands of people and to like make a big active impact. You just hit a milestone telling about that. We just hit three million pounds of food distributed from our get-go. So that's a lot. I don't even know what three million pounds is. It's about 1500 pounds of food a day. We'll probably pick up a couple hundred from this shift alone. Why bikes? Bikes. It just kind of made sense to try to use bikes to try to be as environmentally friendly as possible. It's pretty fun and it really also like for me personally as a bike lover I love the physical impact of it. So at every donor site we have bikes and trailers locked up and what that does is it enables volunteers who either don't have bikes or you know probably most volunteers don't have trailers to utilize our equipment. So as a volunteer I can come to the site I can unlock the bikes and trailers do the shift and then I come back and I lock it up. And then we have like food sorting guides things like this is what a good you know mango bite look like. This is like not so good. The idea behind it is we want to sort food as best as possible because we don't want to distribute things that are actually bad and put that burden on the people receiving the food. So we just compost everything here that we aren't able to distribute. All right so we're gonna go down to the loading dock and ask for the food. They usually have a receiver or produce manager or someone here at the store who puts it aside for us. I feel like to be part of this program of helping out over food rescue and being part of the community in this way. It's very exciting I'm really glad that we're able to do it you know we have sometimes we have inexperienced order writers sometimes we have sales that just don't happen and we thought they would so we have some extra products so it's great that we can take it to a place that can use it right away. These cantaloupes are gonna be heavy. This looks like a lot of food Hayden I don't know how we're gonna get this all in the bikes. I'm giving you all the cantaloupes and melons and I'll take the mushrooms. That's how we're gonna do it. Sounds good. We never know what we're gonna get it's it's kind of different depending on what they're pulling that day so we just kind of go through it and and people will find out I guess as we go. Tomatoes. These bananas are growing because you know maybe he's had this like brown spot but they're actually really ripe it's like kind of perfect to eat. That's a good pepper right there. Oh there's some kiwis even. Somebody's in for a treat. Look at these beautiful mushrooms. This is amazing. It's kind of hard to say why something's gonna waste like of this box of zucchinis and this one looks kind of funny. It's got a fatter bottom and a thinner top and like something like that just might not sell because a consumer wants to buy like the perfect iconic zucchini for example even though this one's still perfectly good. It's a real deal. 400 pounds of food coming through. I've carried a lot of weight on my big bike tours not even close to this much weight. This is super heavy but it's actually it's pretty efficient with these big trailers. This is really fun and what makes it so much fun is that we're we're doing this on bikes. This is a human-powered effort right here and when things are carried human-powered they're carried with love and that's what this is all about. We're not only distributing food we're distributing food with a touch of love. I think I have everything. It looks like it's all there. It sounds like it's all bouncing off every time I hit a bump but oh look it's green! We got this! Top top speed! Sharp left. We made it all in one piece and no broken eggs. All right so where are we? So we're at a housing complex called Red Oak Park and residents here help receive the food and take it in and sort it out and call neighbors and they're called grocery program coordinators. They're an active part of how all of this works and it enables people to help out to get involved and to help create food access in their own communities. We bring the food and then we really give it to the community to do what they want with it. Most places set up this kind of setup where it's like what we call a grocery program. It's essentially like a no-cost grocery store and people can come through you can see people bring bags and they fill up their bags and they take what they need and most people are always looking out for their neighbors. I mean the stories of like if somebody's not as mobile people will take food to them. If they know someone else needs it more they'll make sure that they get enough so people in the community they know each other so they're looking out for each other. As Boulder Food Rescue we support them but they really get to have power and ownership and a say in how these resources get transferred amongst their community and so it not only gives food it's not only about giving a resource away it's about giving power away it's about giving people a voice giving people a way to participate giving them a hand in actually creating a system that works for them.