 and welcome to Connecting Hawaii Business on Think Tech Hawaii. My name is Kathleen Lee, and I am your host for this program. Today, I am excited to introduce our guest on the show, Executive Director for Aloha Harvest, Brandon Tomita. Brandon, thank you for being on the show. Kathleen, thank you for having me. Of course. Tell our viewers about yourself. All right. Well, thank you. My name is Brandon. As you mentioned, I'm the Executive Director of Aloha Harvest. For anyone who does not know what Aloha Harvest is, first of all, I don't blame you, but we are the largest food rescue and redistribution company in Hawaii. We are serving the island of Oahu, and we are actually in our 25th year of operation. So we started in 1999, the Haoli-Maoloa Foundation, and Bob Harrison with First Hawaiian Bank really got us started. What we do as a food rescue company is we get food that would otherwise go to waste from your sources that could be a store, that could be a restaurant, that could be a farm. We get that food and we get it over to a recipient agency. These agencies could be anything from a church, a nonprofit, a food pantry. Anyone who's going to help us get that food into the hands of the community that needs it. So overall, our mission is two parts. Number one, reduce waste, and number two, work on increasing food security. I think that is wonderful. And before I delve into that further, I understand that it's been a few months since you got into the position. Where were you before that? And how are you bringing in your previous leadership experiences into this new Executive Director position? Yeah, I started with Aloha Harvest October 30th of last year. So now I think it's been about, it's going to be about four months somewhere around there, if I'm doing the math correctly. Prior to this, I was the Chief Operating Officer of Wahiwa General Hospital. I had been there about four and a half years, started right before COVID. And of course, obviously COVID brings in this time warp where you feel like you've been there forever. But what I do bring with having past experience in a small entity that faces some of the same issues that all of us in the nonprofit arena currently are facing. Number one is being able to operate in an arena that is a bit chaotic and a bit uncertain, especially on finances. I joined Wahiwa General. And you know, it's no secret that Wahiwa itself had been really struggling financially for a number of years prior to me joining. A lot of the nonprofits right now because of, you know, unforeseen circumstances do sort of face kind of uncertain financial situation, you know, through this next year or so, potentially even further. And so I think that kind of ability to scramble and make do with what you have and really kind of fight through, I think that's going to be a big push there. But really what I do bring from the healthcare side that I would like to see us incorporate in Aloha Harvest is the integration of food security and overall connection to health. You know, coming from healthcare as a nonprofit, you are required every three years to do a community health needs assessment. And in Hawaii, we have the benefit of having a really good association that helps lead all of the hospitals through that process. Through COVID, you know, the number one concern, I believe the number one concern was actually food insecurity. And you know, that's obviously something that we're addressing as a healthcare provider, though, as a hospital, as a doctor's office. Your focus really is to get that patient, that customer treated and back into the community. You don't really have that ability to really kind of work on some of these social needs. And so I think that's the part that I'm most interested in. You know, we have a number of different programs that Aloha Harvest. I would like to see how we can work more closely with the healthcare coalition that the healthcare community to really address some of these needs of their patients. I think that's great that you have that background and you have that goal. For people that may want to have a clear definition of what food security or what food insecurity is, you can take that either way. What is food security? What is food insecurity? And like, who does it affect? I think the simplest way to put it, food security is not having the fear that you're not going to be able to get a meal, right? I mean, that's about as simple as we can state. Who it's affecting, it's not just those who are, you know, the houseless community or those who are really in that poverty line. Through COVID, we've really seen an increased demand in food supplies and food stuffs coming from the, you know, kind of reaching even into the middle class. The Aloha United Way has their Alice Drive and I'm going to try and struggle through to get the acronym correct. But essentially, these are families who are working, but still can't make all those ends meet. That, you know, getting to that point where you have these citizens, residents, you know, community members, family members who are just at that tipping point, you know, and really are seeking that, what are your basic necessities are? If they are, you know, pushed over towards the, you know, further down that poverty line or poverty rating, you could see this bigger push into the houseless community into those who are really struggling. So that's what we're trying to work to prevent. Working with our partners in the community. That's about, you know, there's a lot of different definitions, but to me, that's the easiest way to define food security, food insecurity. Do you have the fear of being able to get your next meal? Is how is the food sourced? What is the process? I know one of the goals is to minimize food waste because you mentioned before in a previous conversation that we had, like earlier this week, you mentioned that there is a lot of food waste and the organization is trying to address that by using it, but not by making sure that food doesn't go to waste and is used in a better manner in a way that helps out people who may need it. So what is the process? Like how is it vetted, you know? Right. So there's different avenues to have food wasted and unfortunately one of the biggest ways and, you know, I'll be the first to admit, I do fall into this area as well. You go to Costco and you buy this gigantic bag of whatever it is that you're going to get, you know, a bag of spinach, a bag of lettuce, and you have every intention when you're in the store to, you know, consume all of it. But, you know, things happen and you realize, oh, it's been in my fridge for a while. I take a look at it and now it's bowed and I can't use it so I've taught it out. That's generally going to be your biggest source of food waste and, you know, the way to try to prevent that is to try and, you know, obviously consume what you buy, but, you know, find the partner that you can share costs with or even, you know, don't buy the gigantic bag of spinach if you, you know, you're not really going to eat it by a, maybe a smaller bag at a different store. What we are generally working with in our arena is larger stores will have stock that is, you know, about to hit their best sell-by date, your best buy date, your sell-by date. And they know that they're going to have to rotate that stock out because there's more shipments coming in and if people don't buy it, you know, it's going to be, it's going to go to waste. And so that's a good source right there that we can get. You have other avenues of this. So let's say a restaurant. Your restaurants could, you know, create a buffet line. And so you have these foods that are prepared and then at the end of the night they realize that they didn't put out, you know, X number of trays, X number of items. That's a food item that we can take and get to one of our recipient agencies. You also have a farm. You have farms or even residents. We do have a community harvest program which the small-scale gleaning. You could have a tree of avocado and, you know, you have 100 avocados every day on your yard and you don't really know what to do with them. Farms have this on a larger scale, right? They may not have either the time or the labor to pick some of these items. We can go ahead and help that out too. Glean these items, get it, get it over to recipient agencies. So there are different avenues that we can get. Obviously the restaurant prepared food route brings a little bit more risk and there are steps in place to make sure that the food doesn't get out of that window to where the food is unsafe. There are, for us, the benefit is we've always had a protection to, you know, liability-wise, there's a good Samaritan law in place. If a donor is giving the food in their best efforts, we can take it, we can get it to our recipient agency, to the community and we're protected from the liabilities there. The Biden administration has actually expanded that protection over to even a person-to-person type interaction, you know, in an effort to reduce waste and to address food security as well. So there are liabilities in place. They're understandably some larger entities are a little bit concerned, even though that, you know, that laws on the books that they would be held liable for anything that should go wrong on the line. So we do work with them as much as we can to put them at ease that, you know, we do follow steps to make sure that everything is safe throughout that process. And your organization does not store the food, is that correct? So then you, so how does that scheduling work? You talk to the donors or the organizations that you work with and you figure out how that, like, how pickup works? Yeah, sometimes it's going to be frantic phone calls and their texts back and forth saying, hey, there's just, you know, food available. It's coming this afternoon. Can you guys take it? Yes or no? You know, and it's a work that I really got to give it up to our ops team, coordinating that. Sometimes it's a little bit more controlled than that. Those who have donated and are used to our process, we do give them aluminum trays that they can go ahead and pack that food in, cold start in their facility, and then we can pick it up the next day, which is one of the reasons why besides fuel and labor, one of our largest costs is aluminum trays, not even kidding. We spend, I believe last year, somewhere in the arena of $20,000 to $30,000 than aluminum trays, trays and lids. So that comes in and it goes out pretty frequently to be able to collect this food item and get it out to our partners. So there's a, and you just made me think about this now, there's a good amount of unpredictability when it comes to getting food in to disperse to those in need. Is that kind of where we're going? There can be. Fortunately, I think we've had, our ops manager has been in place now for 13 years. So as far as unpredictable, they've seen everything and so I think the unpredictable can be sort of predictable. What does help is there are a number of recipient agencies who have worked with us for so long and they basically will say yes to anything. They'll say, bring it over. We'll figure it out. And so that is really helpful. I myself didn't get to experience this. There was a pickup. It was supposed to be about 11.30 at night. It turned out to be about 10.30. It wasn't so bad. And they were, it was five minutes around the corner. I dropped it off to them and they were more than happy to take it. So yeah, it's helpful to have people who have already been through the process and really helps it go smoothly. But yeah, at the times where it is unpredictable, if not our routes, we do depend on a large number of volunteers to help pick up and deliver these items to the community. So that's really helpful. You mentioned earlier restaurants and there's also hotels and like wholesale distributors. If there were families or even individuals that wanted to donate, is there a process for that or is it just the wholesalers or the much larger organizations that you take food from? We actually do get a lot of even walk-in donations. So at any given point, I'll be in my office and I hear the elevator door open and someone comes down and they go ahead and they walk in with a bag of something and we're more than happy to take it. Sometimes it could even be like something you don't eat like body wash or slippers or whatnot. We do work with so many different community agencies that will just take whatever and hand it off and they'll be able to figure out what to do with it. But yeah, if it's a pickup, our rule is going to be, hey, if you're going to call us to come pick it up, we do want to make sure that it's at least five pounds to me. We're at the trip out there because it is a fuel and labor cost initiative, but we really do appreciate even the small individual giving because it all adds up. As of January, we rescued our 35 million pounds. We're just going to redistribute 35 million pounds worth of food now over the last 25 years. The rate of rescue really picked up during COVID. Prior to that, it had been a much smaller organization and then my predecessor actually helped grow the operation over the last four or five years. What type of food does your organization take in or don't take it? Wait, is there a criteria for what you can accept as donations? We actually taken a lot of produce, a lot of packaged goods obviously because these are things that are going to be kind of moving in and out of stores pretty quickly. During COVID, we saw a lot of eggs, a lot of milk, a lot of produce like bananas or oranges or potatoes, things like that, which were essential to get out to the community. The good side, the bad side of that, it's great that we were getting these items, but it's bad because it meant the stores just couldn't get that inventory out, so they're struggling on that side. There isn't too much that we don't take. There's even times where I look at an item that comes in and I'm saying, I'm not even sure what this is, what do we do with this? We'll work with the community to try and figure out where things go. If we get something like an exotic spice or some kind of food item that I'm not too familiar with, we ask around first, what would you do with this? Who could we possibly contact for this item and see if they'll take it? If not, we end up holding a couple of things until we can figure out the match for it. That's actually good to know, because in my head, I'm thinking it's mostly just produce, like you said, but I was unsure how your organization takes in meat or even not necessarily junk food, but snacks that are packed. How does that get distributed, and it's good that you've pointed out that there is a five pound minimum in order for your staff to go over and pick up those items to be dispersed to those who do need it? We do. Recently, we had a pretty large donation from one of our partners of candy. I think it was like kind of getting that Halloween stock out and getting ready for the next wave coming in. We're sitting on pallets of candy, and I was kind of laughing with our operations team. I said, what do we do with all this? We have just probably the most amount of candy I've ever seen. Who do we give this to? And really, what kind of blowback people come back to us as we try and work on a pallet, and here we are handing out just box. But if it's donated, we'll find a way to get it out there. I absolutely appreciate that. I think I already asked about how you did it. Did I already ask about how you vet it? Is there an official vetting? Is there a checklist? We do, especially for the prepared foods. If it is stock food, we have kind of a general guideline of what would be accepted, what would not be. So as we look through some of that, especially donated from an individual, if the container is open, we're probably not going to take it. If the container, if it's a cat item and it looks unsafe, it's bulging and it's rusty, again, we'll probably not take it. We'll take it and just throw it out. Items that are open are always going to be risky. So we'll take a look at that. If there's anything that looks obviously wrong, if you do bring in some kind of meat item and it's green when it should be red, then that's obviously a concern. We'll probably dispose of that as well. So yeah, most of it is your basic step-by-step food safety. Prepared foods, again, a little bit more given guidelines. Restaurant industry is very familiar with that. You have that four-hour window to make sure your temps are in control. And one thing I want to make sure we get in there, we are, I think I spoke with this earlier, we are now starting to rescue fish and this is fresh caught fish. It's slowly hitting the news, but we've been working on this for a little bit now to get fish from United Fishing Agency in partnership with the Hawaii Long Line Association and Fresh Island Fish Company. Getting fish from the auction site, fish that would otherwise potentially be wasted because it's not so good. Getting that out to our partners in the community, very exciting to get this project underway. And again, it's going to come with an increased risk, making sure temperatures are in control, making sure waste streams are considered because you have this whole fish going to a partner now. Can you handle this fish? First of all, can you cut it up and prepare it? And if we give you a large volume, can you handle that? And can you responsibly get rid of whatever is left over from the fish? So yeah, we're just starting, really excited to get this underway. So yeah, that's another one where we're going to have to make sure we dot i's and cross t's as we get this project going. Yeah, that was my next question, new initiatives. Aside from that, are there any other initiatives that you want to mention? You know, as I mentioned, kind of at the top, coming from healthcare, having that background, I would like to start to look at how we can work closely with some of our partners in the community. Like we're saying, with hospitals, you don't always have that knowledge or ability of what's out there, right? Knowledge of what's out there, ability to point them in the right direction to a service provider. If your patient says, yes, I am concerned about my next meal, I am food insecure. So having that kind of on my checklist of things I want to get done, that's going to be the next initiative. One of the other large projects that we are working on is we have a USDA grant. This is for our Oahu Food Resilience Hub. Basically, what our long term goal is, is to get a large warehouse space. So like we talked about, you know, it's usually a mad scramble, if something suddenly comes up, takes a little bit of that away. We would have the ability to store larger volumes of food, make more equitable, more efficient decisions, and then possibly also get more involved in the emergency management apparatus for our, definitely for our island, because we're Oahu based, but overall being able to help manage any sort of food distribution needs in the event of a hurricane, a fire, a tsunami, anything of that nature. So that is an upcoming project as well. We're kind of step by step getting there. You've kind of already touched upon your, you know, your goals and the initiatives that you want to see while you're there and what you brought in. Like, let me just simplify one of my last questions. What is your why? Why did you choose to head this organization? You know, there's three, three parts to why it shows a little harvest. Number one for myself personally as a professional, I wanted a company, you know, as the executive director, I answered directly to the board. And so having that board relationship is important. And this board is a young slash youngish board, very good intentions, you know, very, the response to me actually saying, yeah, I'm going to come over was a reason. And I, you know, told our chair this, I said, Hey, your response to me coming over is why I would choose here, right? It's a it's a good fit to good relationship. But number two is the mission. And our mission is one that is appreciated. It's your rescuing quality food to nourish and sustain the community. That's something that, you know, it's very much appreciated. The company has good brand equity with almost everybody in food service. And I do have a lot of friends in food service. My food service friends know what this is, even if most of my other friends are like, what's a little hardest? Number three is the people who are here. You know, they have a lot of them have been here for years and have really put their heart and soul into this company. It's a small company. We have 1617 employees total. And so it's a combination of all three of those that made this a good fit at this point in my career. Thank you for sharing that. Is there anything else that you would like to add that we may not have gone over in a few minutes that we have left? Yeah, you know, I, you know, we had a chance. Obviously, that's where we first met. We were fortunate to be a part of the giving machine campaign. We're very thankful for that. And as a part of my little two minute, you know, kind of speech to the room, my main focus was to ask, how can we help? And that's something I think that's going to be critically important. You know, my time at the Wahiwa, we knew that we couldn't compete with all the big systems. You know, we just didn't have those resources. We knew that our part in there was helping as much as we can with what we had. So how can we provide service to the rest of you to make sure that the coalition benefited? That's the same question we have now. As we enter this time of uncertainty, how can we help? How can we work with you, the other non-profits that are out there? Or even for-profits, just depending on what their mission is. How can we help, you know, benefit our community? Our vision is, of course, a resilient and sustainable Hawaii, where food hunger and food waste and hunger no longer exist. So how can we help achieve that? That's wonderful. If people want to learn more about Aloha Harvest, where do they go? So fortunately, I have here our website. We are alohaharvest.org, pretty straightforward. And I believe our social is at Aloha Harvest. So depending on how you get your news or information, Aloha Harvest will pop up, you know, if you go ahead and put that in your search. That's going to be the easiest way. We have our data, we have our reports, we have all our contact information on there. We usually guide people to our website because it has a pretty thorough view of our company. And of course, if there's anyone in the, I'll say at the younger generation, for more geared towards, you know, Instagram or whatnot, yeah, at Aloha Harvest. Young-ish? Are we part of that? Are we young-ish? You know, I would have said yes, but I think day by day I'm starting to realize no answer. Well, Brandon, thank you for being here today for our viewers. We just had Brandon Tomita, executive director of Aloha Harvest on the show. Thank you. Thank you again for being on today. And thank you to Think Tech Hawaii as well for making shows like this possible. Thank you to Jay Fiedel, Caramon Lee, Mike, who helped us out, and Hayley. Until next time, Aloha.