An hour before lunchtime at My Sister's House, food service supervisor Carlyn Ashley watched as a load of steaks and potatoes from a restaurant across town were placed in her storage closet. For Ashley, it was time to plan a menu for the women in the program, which is connected to the Atlanta Mission.
"They might have some LongHorn for lunch," she said.
Behind the scenes, a sophisticated logistics network connects some of the country's biggest restaurant brands -- KFC, Pizza Hut, The Cheesecake Factory, Panera Bread, Chipotle Mexican Grill, and Darden Restaurants -- with non-profits, charities and other groups that need prepared food. It's a tougher job than collecting canned goods; prepared food is harder to keep fresh. There are food safety regulations and quick shelf lives to consider. But food retrievers have found allies among chefs and restaurant executives in salvaging food that might otherwise go to waste.
"Our job is to be the coordinating arm," said Bill Reighard, a former Pizza Hut executive who leads the Food Donation Connection, a for-profit organization. "We are in charge of connecting the very high-speed restaurant industry with the client, the non-profits. We're giving them food they didn't know existed."
The link from restaurants to middleman to charities has grown in reach and sophistication, and now facilitates a stream of prepared food to the needy. Donations of prepared food, of a quality and quantity that many charities could not otherwise afford, have become ingrained in restaurant business plans.
Bill Bolling, Atlanta Community Food Bank founder and chief executive, said his requests to restaurants were fairly blunt three decades ago, when he rode around in a pickup truck scrounging for supplies.
"I said, ‘Hey, you guys have food and I don't have any -- you should give me some,'" recalled Bolling, whose pitch often failed because local managers weren't empowered to make the decision. "You have to create something that works for the whole company."
Since 1987, the Atlanta food bank has collected prepared and perishable food and delivered it to more than 40 non-profit agencies daily. The "Atlanta's Table" program was one of the first of its kind. Today, four of the food bank's 12 trucks pick up prepared foods, and Atlanta's Table collects and distributes 20 tons of food every month.
"They make it very easy," said Kris Reinhard, general manager of Bold American Events & Catering, which donates more than 400 pounds of food annually; everything from turkey and pork loin to pasta and rice. "They just come over and grab it."
Donations could help reduce the massive amounts of food wasted in the U.S. A 2009 study found that per capita food waste has increased by 50 percent in the U.S. since 1974. Even though chefs and kitchen staff don't want to discard extra food, they don't know what to do with it in many cases. Throwing food away can be the path of least resistance, Bolling said.
Despite a federal "good Samaritan" law protecting donors and recipient agencies against liability except in cases of gross negligence or intentional misconduct, it can still be a challenge to convince restaurants they can safely and efficiently donate prepared food.
"We tend to believe groups hide behind roadblocks, the No. 1 being liability," said Reighard. "Alfredo, lobster or some kind of hamburger, unfortunately it's easier to pitch it than properly save it."
Bolling said liability can be avoided if restaurant managers follow health codes. "There is a judicious way to do this, and the proof's in the pudding," he said. "We've been doing this for 31 years. We have not had a lawsuit; we have not had an incident of anyone getting sick."
With unemployment slicing deep into the middle class, need has risen and waste of perishable food has become a more pressing concern. Each week, about 5.7 million people receive emergency food assistance from an agency linked to Feeding America, the nation's leading domestic hunger-relief charity. That is a 27 percent increase in half a decade.
Starting at 7:30 or 8 on weekday mornings, trucks pull out from the food bank's 130,000-square foot warehouse in west Atlanta to collect food from restaurants within a 30-mile radius.
Earlier this month, Daniel Hernandez, transportation coordinator for the food bank, steered a truck down I-75 for the morning's food retrieval. He stopped behind a LongHorn restaurant in East Point and loaded 142 pounds of beef and potatoes onto a hand truck. Minutes later, he stepped into the back kitchen of a Red Lobster and grabbed loads of chicken, potatoes, shrimp, and snow crab legs.
The Atlanta's Table program has recovered food from the Georgia Dome, the Georgia World Congress Center, Super Bowl parties and, occasionally, canceled weddings.
"That's a tough call to get," Hernandez said. "You say, ‘Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but we'll be there.'"
A number of restaurant companies are putting their food to good use. Darden -- parent company of Olive Garden, LongHorn and Red Lobster -- donated 8.8 million pounds of food in fiscal 2010. Darden restaurants in Atlanta donated 101 tons of fresh food in the year ending May 31.
"It allows us to take food that's perfectly good and safe to eat, but for a variety of reasons can't be served to guests," said John Alexander, LongHorn's senior vice president of operations for the Atlanta division. "It's the right thing to do."
The Cheesecake Factory donated nearly one million pounds of food last year to soup kitchens, YMCAs and shelters for battered women. A year ago, Starbucks joined with the Food Donation Connection to reduce its waste of discarded pastries, whole bean coffee and packaged food by increasing the number of stores donating food.
Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, parent company of Einstein Bros. Bagels, gives bagels to churches, homeless shelters and parent-teacher associations on a case-by-case basis, but is working to craft a national program.
Panera Bread Co. donates unsold bread and baked items, including croissants, baguettes and bagels, to churches, food pantries and other agencies. The St. Louis-based company says the retail value of the donations is more than $85 million per year. Pacci Ristorante in Midtown recently donated $1,200 worth of coffee to the Atlanta Community Food Bank when it switched to a new brand.
Mike Reed, founder of a transitional home for single women and unwed mothers in Canton, recently stopped by a LongHorn restaurant in Canton to pick up a 90-pound container of potatoes, fillets, mushroom sauce, rice, jalapeno cheese rolls and lemon juice.
"It's a big help," said Reed. "We use every bit of it."
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