It’s a sunny Tuesday morning when a crowd gathers at the corner of University and Ninth Streets in Berkeley. Armed with reusable grocery bags and folding shopping carts, they wait for the food pantry to open at Berkeley Food Network, one of the largest food aid organizations in Alameda County.
Inside the building, the line snakes around a check-in station to a cordoned-off area designed to give the experience of shopping in a small market. Heaps of corn and cantaloupes fill cardboard boxes in a central produce section. Plastic bags full of freshly picked vegetables and herbs sit on countertops tended by volunteers. In one corner, bright lights glow from inside an empty commercial refrigerator — a reminder of the crisis that food banks and other feeding organizations now face.
With food prices on the rise, disruptions to agriculture caused by ICE raids, the end of several federal programs that once supported hunger relief, and unprecedented cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, i.e., CalFresh), the outlook for these organizations is uncertain. But Andrew Crispin, the executive director of the Berkeley Food Network, says one part of their work is holding strong for now: food recovery.
Every week, thousands of pounds of high-quality fruits and vegetables pour in from local grocery stores, restaurants, manufacturers and school districts — food that would otherwise go to waste. Instead, it ends up on the tables of people who need it. Other hunger relief groups in the state tell a similar story: food recovery remains steady amid the political and financial turmoil. One food bank is even ramping up its efforts to help offset funding gaps.
Will Dittmar, chair of the California Food Recovery Coalition, said that food recovery in California is likely holding steady due to Senate Bill 1383. Signed by former Gov. Jerry Brown, the bill requires businesses to donate surplus food or face possible fines. It aims to recover 20% of edible food that would otherwise go to waste and has led to the recovery of 700 million unsold meals since the program began in 2022.
No other state has passed such a mandate, positioning California as a national leader in this area. However, SB 1383 has a major flaw: The state hasn’t given enough funding to support it, placing the burden on nonprofits to find resources for building the infrastructure to process donations.
“Right now, we’re in a double pinch,” Dittmar said, referring to rising food needs after the massive cuts to SNAP. “On the food recovery side,” he continued, businesses are reaching out to form partnerships with feeding organizations, but public funding for labor, storage, and other infrastructure necessary to recover food is lacking. As surplus food donations steadily roll in, many fear that the resources and networks that help redirect this food to those in need may be at risk, leaving vulnerable populations with even fewer options.
Food recovery helps the climate
California produces half the nation’s fruit and vegetables, yet it’s also one of the biggest contributors to food waste. The edible food required to provide 2.5 billion meals ends up in California’s landfills every year, according to CalRecycle, the agency responsible for the state’s waste management initiatives. At the same time, 8.8 million Californians struggle with hunger – and that number is climbing.
“We have seen a continual increase in service demand year over year, month over month,” said Crispin. Last January, the Berkeley Food Network was serving around 400 households daily, nearly double the number it had served the previous year. That number surged to 700 households in the first couple of months of this year.
“A lot of the community members who access our services are the working poor,” Crispin said. “It’s folks who earn money and oftentimes are employed. Sometimes two people in their household work, but they’re not making enough to thrive.”
Rescuing food before it becomes waste is not only a way to feed those in need — it’s a climate solution. When food rots in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. More than one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, wasting food in the U.S. Causes the same quantity of greenhouse gas emissions as 50 million gas-powered cars and trucks.
“A lot of the community members who access our services are the working poor. It’s folks who earn money and oftentimes are employed. Sometimes two people in their household work, but they’re not making enough to thrive.”
Andrew Crispin, Berkeley Food Network executive director
Andrew Crispin, Berkeley Food Network executive director
Local governments often place landfills near low-income communities and communities of color — the same groups that tend to experience the highest rates of food insecurity. One in five Californians lacks enough food to eat, with much higher levels for Black and Latino households, according to the California Association of Food Banks. Meanwhile, a 2007 study showed that California has the nation’s highest concentration of people of color living near hazardous waste facilities.
“We are all biologically wired to abhor waste — and that includes food waste,” said Dittmar, who also leads Extra Food, an organization that recovers food from across the San Francisco Bay Area. That instinct, he explained, is why food recovery has often garnered bipartisan support in the past. Under the Biden administration, funding avenues opened up for food recovery through the EPA’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, created by the Inflation Reduction Act. But since Trump took office, those programs have been either frozen or terminated as part of a broader move away from climate and environmental justice by the administration.
“If California is going to lead the nation in climate, we have to continue to walk the talk,” Dittmar said, expressing faith in SB 1383 despite its shortcomings. “I am optimistic that we can show progress in the (food recovery) space.”
Federal budget cuts
Funding structures vary among organizations that practice food recovery, and some received more direct federal support than others. Berkeley Food Network provides its clients with about 40,000 pounds of surplus food each month, representing just 15% of its total operations. Whereas it has only felt the “ripple effects” of federal funding cuts, about 30 miles northeast, in Concord, another organization, White Pony Express, has taken a more direct hit.
The organization’s executive director, Eve Birge, said that nearly $900,000 of its $2.9 million budget has been cut or frozen in the first nine months of 2025. “We’ve only been able to make up for about $150,000 this year to date,” Birge added.
White Pony Express is exclusively dedicated to food recovery, processing roughly 14,000 pounds of perishable food daily, or about 98,000 pounds per week. That food is then redistributed to food pantries and other service providers throughout Contra Costa County. Despite the organization’s dire funding situation, it’s not recovering less food. Its staff and volunteers have pitched in to assist with outreach to farms and other potential donors to support their work. But Birge notes that the staff is stretched thin and “without sustained county and community investment, the food recovery system could unravel, leaving thousands more in hunger.”
Food Forward, a food recovery nonprofit in Southern California, has been less reliant on government funding and says its operations are holding steady. However, some of their hunger relief partners have been affected. “We’re feeling a lot of trickle-down concern and just trying to think how we’re gonna meet the moment most effectively,” said Ellen DeVine, the organization’s director of agency relations.
Claudia Bonilla Keller, the CEO of Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County, said recent federal funding cuts have hurt the organization’s purchasing power. The USDA’s Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which would have given around $500 million to food banks this year to purchase fresh produce from local farmers, was terminated in March. In response, Second Harvest is doubling down on its rescue efforts, collecting more food from grocery retailers.
However, scaling up is complicated and costly and might not ultimately alleviate financial pressures.
“The fact is that in order to bring a food recovery program to scale and really have the potential to put a dent in nutrition security, you need infrastructure,” explained Birge, whose organization has a fleet of 13 vehicles and over 1,200 volunteers. “You need refrigerated vehicles, you need a large cooler, you need a freezer, you need a space. All of that funding that has already been cut or frozen means that our infrastructure is in jeopardy.”
Part of that infrastructure involves having people to sort out and discard inedible produce. Many food recovery organizations refer to “donation dumping” as a problem that ultimately costs them, as they are the ones footing the bill to turn that produce into compost.
Keller doesn’t see it that way. “We not only care about the health of the people that we serve (but) the health of the environment that we are in. So we don’t necessarily see it as a cost, but rather as the cost of doing business in a responsible way,” she said.
Big questions about the future
On a recent morning, a small army of volunteers slid into neon green vests at Berkeley Food Network and got to work portioning freshly picked rosemary, yellow wax beans, and plump purple grapes into plastic bags. Most organizations we spoke with agreed that SB 1383 is a good idea in theory and, despite the kinks, has led to increased donations that they need now more than ever.
The long-term effects of federal funding shifts on food recovery remain unclear, but the potential for increased hunger and waste highlights the urgent need for this work to continue — and even expand — with stable state funding in an increasingly volatile landscape.
Birge and Dittmar are both involved in the California Food Recovery Coalition, promoting policy advocacy and collaborating with local and federal-level representatives, while also fostering partnerships with other organizations.
“We are not gonna be able to address these (challenges) if we’re all working in our silos,” Birge said. “We have to lock arms right now.”
In the meantime, food recovery groups are bracing for the full and seemingly inevitable impact of the Trump administration’s decisions. “I don’t think this is unique to the food recovery or nonprofit sector,” said Dittmar. “There is so much uncertainty in just about any marketplace you look at right now, and everyone is kind of like, ‘Hold fast to the best of your ability.’”
This story was produced with support from the Climate Equity Reporting Project and the Stakes Project at UC Berkeley Journalism School.
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