Ready to Take Action?

Are you a business that is looking to donate food? Are you a food bank that is wanting to receive more food? Perfect! Sign up on our website.

Do you know any businesses or food banks that can be benefited from this? Perfect! Contact us using the form at the bottom of this page or email us directly at info.feedkc@gmail.com.

Our Story

Our project started in 2017 when we recognized two devastating challenges in the Kansas City community: food waste and food insecurity.

In Kansas City, 1 in 8 people face food insecurity. Over 108,000 of those experiencing food insecurity in our area are children, and of these children, 42% do not qualify for federal nutrition programs. Hundreds of thousands of our neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family in the area suffer from hunger every day.

At the same time, 40% of ALL food produced in the United States ends up in a landfill – an estimated 65 million tons of food waste per year. This costs our country 165 billion dollars annually while drastically increasing fossil fuel emissions and freshwater consumption. One of our own UMKC Enactus members who worked in the UMKC cafeteria noticed the extent of food waste in our own backyard and brought this challenge to the team.

Rather than seeing these challenges as roadblocks, though, we saw them as opportunities. At the intersection of these two needs, we used creativity and innovation to craft a solution! We connected with local food vendors like the UMKC cafeteria to take safe and nutritious food to local food banks instead of the landfill.

After implementing our service at UMKC, we have reduced our food waste by more than 700 lbs per semester. That’s 700 lbs of food directly translating into dollars saved for their bottom line in just 4 months.

After experiencing success with our manual recovery process, we decided that in order to ensure the sustainability of the project, we would need something to facilitate these recoveries to take the weight of manual recoveries off of the unpredictable schedules of college students. With all this in mind, on March 16, 2020 we introduced our FeedKC Web Application – feed-kc.com!! The app connects businesses and soup kitchens directly to create a more direct line of communication and to dismiss the need for a middleman in these processes.

Outcomes

• Since project inception:
  • Recovered 3.35 tons of food in Kansas City
  • Provided 6,682 meals to Kansas Citians
  • Prevented 480 lbs of methane and 12,696 lbs of CO2 from being released into the environment
• Won the Grand Prize for the Unilever Bright Future Grant at 2018 Nationals
• Won grant at the Pure Pitch Rally Pitch in Kansas City
• Participated in the TCU Values & Ventures Competition 2019

What We Plan on Doing

• Expanding our network of businesses and food banks
• Finding a community sustainability partner
• Scale our web application across the United States by partnering with other Enactus teams

Eat and Ask Campaign

At Feed KC, we have a campaign called Eat and Ask. The Eat and Ask campaign is where members of Feed KC go eat at a popular restaurant in the local area, then inform the restaurant about the Feed KC project and ask them if they would like to join in order to help fight food waste and food insecurity. Members either go ask local restaurants on their free time or form small groups and ask a few in one go.

The team also organizes events such as Feed KC Unleashed, where several small groups are formed and split up in search of restaurants who would be willing to join our efforts all over the Kansas City area. The team during the Feed KC Unleashed event asked 40+ restaurants in the Crossroads, Westport, Power & Light, Brookside, and Plaza areas in a single night, with more events like it soon to come!