CHARLOTTE, N.C. — The narrative around agricultural food waste is changing. While diverting surplus produce from fields to food-insecure families is nothing new, the infrastructure, metrics and technology governing food rescue are changing in real time.
This shift was a central focus at the ReFED Food Waste Solutions Summit held May 19–21 in Charlotte, N.C., where industry leaders gathered to discuss how today’s food recovery organizations are evolving. No longer just grassroots operations looking for a simple handout, these groups are operating as highly sophisticated logistics partners built to meet growers exactly where they are.
One innovator is The Farmlink Project, a national nonprofit that reroutes surplus produce directly at the farm level before it ever enters retail channels. It’s a logistically complex point in the supply chain, but one that is desperately needed.
A Product of Crisis, Built for Scale
Farmlink started as a pandemic-era grassroots movement. In 2020, a group of college students watched the news in horror as supply chains collapsed, hospitality venues shut down and millions of pounds of viable food rotted in fields while food bank lines wrapped around city blocks. The founders recognized a glaring paradox: The issue wasn’t a lack of food or a lack of need, but a failure of connection.
“Getting that food from point A to point B was the challenge,” says Eliza Blank, CEO of Farmlink. “And not only was it about coordinating the transportation of that food, but it was actually paying for the transportation of that food.”
Today, the organization has scaled remarkably, moving upward of 2 million lb. to 2.5 million lb. of fresh food every single week.
Acting as the Farmer’s “Last Call”
For growers, packers and shippers, the financial and logistical strain of dealing with sudden surplus can be paralyzing. Because fresh produce is highly perishable, the clock is always ticking. Farmlink has optimized its operations to handle these tight timelines, executing rescues within a strict 24-to-48-hour window. Also important, Farmlink doesn’t try to compete with a farmer’s bottom line. The goal is to be a seamless safety net.
“Farmers don’t want to donate their food, they want to sell their food,” Blank says. “And when they can’t sell their food on the primary market or on the secondary market, then they know, or we hope they know, to call Farmlink. And so it’s our relationships that allow us to move so quickly, and it’s the freight and the transportation that we provide, in addition to the coordination, that makes this work possible.”
By stepping in to cover the freight costs and logistics, Farmlink removes the traditional barriers that historically forced growers to abandon or destroy crops.
Moving Beyond Pounds Diverted
For years, the gold standard for PR in the food rescue space has been total pounds diverted. It’s a clean, legible number for a press release, but Blank argues it is a flawed metric that fails to address the real needs of communities and disincentivizes true equity. You cannot feed a community on a single massive shipment of tomatoes alone, she says.
Instead, Farmlink is pushing the industry toward a more deliberate and intentional approach — focusing on getting the right food, in the right format, to the right community, at the right time. Doing so requires moving past volume-driven metrics and focusing heavily on long-term infrastructure investments, like regional cold storage and coordinated logistics hubs.
“If we only and exclusively focus on pounds, we are not giving due pressure to the infrastructure investments that we need,” Blank says. “A funder is going to say, ‘Well, why don’t you deliver more pounds of food?’ It’s like, ‘Because we’re over here building the whole system that is going to make this delivery possible.’ You have to actually be able to balance that narrative to say, ‘Yes, of course, we can deliver pounds, but also we need to make these incredible investments in infrastructure that will outlast next week’s pounds.’”
The Power of Collaboration
As federal safety nets shift and food insecurity fluctuates, Farmlink isn’t trying to build an empire or consolidate the food rescue space. Coming from the fast-paced venture capital and direct-to-consumer corporate world, Blank quickly realized the fragmentation of the food rescue sector is actually its greatest strength. Different regions and communities require niche, localized interventions. The future of agricultural sustainability relies entirely on different sectors of the supply chain communicating and cooperating seamlessly.
“What I quickly realized was no, it’s actually fragmented on purpose that every individual and every community needs specific interventions,” Blank says. “And so what I realized then was that what we’re really good at here ... is collaboration and cooperation. I think that’s really what drives the work forward. It’s not about consolidation and roll-ups, it’s actually about cooperation and collaboration, and doing the thing that you do well.”
For the produce industry, Farmlink represents a new era of waste management — one rooted in strong relationship building, rapid-response logistics and a commitment to building a resilient system that benefits the farmer, the family and the planet.
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