Banking on KC – Tamara Weber of Pete's Garden
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Kelly Scanlon:
Welcome to Banking on KC. I'm your host, Kelly Scanlon. Thank you for joining us. With us on this episode is Tamara Weber, the executive director of Pete's Garden, which is a food rescue nonprofit organization. Welcome, Tamara.
Tamara Weber:
Thank you. Thank you for hosting me.
Kelly Scanlon:
Talk to us a little bit more about what that means, a food rescue nonprofit. What do you do exactly?
Tamara Weber:
In the United States, there are about 90 million tons of food that gets wasted every year. So this is food that mostly is good to eat, that just is surplus or not quite right for whatever reason.
Kelly Scanlon:
So produce might look a little oddly shaped or perhaps some blemishes, but be perfectly fine to eat.
Tamara Weber:
Sure. Or our focus is prepared food. So we work with restaurants, caterers, food service operations, places that are making food in bulk for large groups. So if you could imagine a convention of 500 people and 400 show up for dinner. So that caterer now has an extra 100 meals, and it's not always easy to know what to do with all that food, there's only so much that staff can take home. So without an easy way for them to redirect it somewhere else, a lot of times it just gets thrown out because that's the easy answer.
Kelly Scanlon:
So you work with these groups and then you redistribute the food?
Tamara Weber:
Yeah, so we pick up the food from the chefs and the food service managers. We bring it back, we have a commercial kitchen that's inspected by the Kansas City Health Department. My staff and myself all have food safety manager certification. And we have volunteers that portion and package all of that surplus food into family size portions and take-home containers. And then all of that food, it's all restaurant quality, ready-to-heat food. We distribute that as take-home meals to families that are served by Head Start programs, after school programs. Any nonprofit that serves families with children is a potential distribution agency for us.
Kelly Scanlon:
You're the founder of this. So what gave you the idea to do it? And did you have nonprofit organization experience prior to this?
Tamara Weber:
No. No, I don't have any nonprofit or food experience. Most of my experience here in Kansas City has been working with Hallmark and a lot of my experience at Hallmark was in the new business development world or new product development. How I started was that my daughter was in eighth grade at the time, and she was in a club at school.
Kelly Scanlon:
About five years ago, if I remember correctly.
Tamara Weber:
Five years ago. Yeah, so we just celebrated our five-year anniversary. So my daughter was in a club at school and she was learning about food waste. And we watched this documentary Wasted, produced by Anthony Bourdain. That was my first exposure to what a big issue it is environmentally as well as socially. If there's good food, not junk food, this is good, healthy, wholesome food that is getting wasted. My reaction to that was we need to be able to redirect that food to feed people.
So my daughter and I were looking for organizations in Kansas City where we can get involved to volunteer. And again, with a new business background, I started looking at the market for surplus food in Kansas City and realized that the prepared food in particular, there wasn't really an outlet for it. So chefs and caterers didn't always know what to do with the food or if they knew where they could donate it, they didn't always have the time to take it somewhere to be donated. So that was the food that was getting wasted.
And as a working mom, my husband was traveling a lot for work. I had two young kids at home. The inspiration really for Pete's Garden was my dad, Pete, who had a big garden, grew all of our own vegetables and even some, he had some apple trees and fruit trees. So we grew up where we didn't waste food, especially the food that he grew, and we had dinner together as a family every night. So growing up, that was kind of what was normal for me, and I wanted to have that same kind of experience with my own kids.
So my concept was if there's all this prepared food out there, why can't we portion and package it up and get it to working moms who don't necessarily have the means to go and order takeout or get something from the salad bar at Whole Foods or nice food. So that's what Pete's Garden does, we take great quality food that's fresh, prepared, wholesome food, and get it out to families with kids. They can have a nice quality meal to share as a family at home.
Kelly Scanlon:
And you work a lot through existing nonprofits to help them with their missions too?
Tamara Weber:
We don't distribute anything directly to families, we work through other organizations that are already serving these families, either education needs or with some housing organizations. My one meal a week or two meals a week that I can get to a family isn't going to solve all of their problems, so I like to work with organizations that are already offering these families a lot of different services. So the meal is just one additional service for the family and makes maybe one or two nights a week a little bit easier for, usually it's a working mom, working a low wage job and just doesn't necessarily have the time or the money or the means to have a nice meal on the table every night.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah, and we all know that food is a connector and it's also very comforting. So you're bringing that aspect of it to the table as well.
It's amazing what you're doing because sometimes you hear about, oh, a restaurant can't save that food, especially once it's been served. So that's contributing to food waste because it's illegal to, or it's against the city's code for you to be able... You might lose your license. So can you speak to that? How does that affect what you do?
Tamara Weber:
Yeah, there is actually a law, Bill Emerson or the Good Samaritan Act that's been on the books since 1996. Bill Emerson was actually a representative from South Eastern Missouri, and he worked to pass a law that eliminates the liability from any food donor who donates food in good faith. So meaning, as far as they know, that food is healthy and wholesome to eat. If they donated that food to a nonprofit, they're free from any liability.
My organization does carry business liability, and we have all of our food safety certifications and our kitchen is inspected by the city health department, but it is perfectly safe, legal to donate good-to-eat food. I think a lot of restaurants and caterers maybe aren't aware of that, or I think the bigger problem really is that there just hasn't always been an option that is safe and convenient for them to donate. Because I could totally understand a restaurant or a caterer doesn't want to donate to an organization if they don't feel confident that that organization is going to maintain food safety protocols.
So we need to make sure that we are always doing more than what we're required to do in terms of maintaining food safety. We have a refrigerated van to pick up the food. We work, as I said, in a commercial kitchen. We have on-site refrigeration. But it is perfectly legal and safe. And in fact, the Missouri Health Department is really supportive of what we do because they recognize that there does need to be an outlet for this good-to-eat food, and it needs to be a safe and convenient outlet that chefs and caterers will actually use. So they're supportive of what we do because they don't want food to go to waste either.
Kelly Scanlon:
Right. Speaking of that, how much food does go to waste on, I don't know, pick an interval, a weekly basis, a daily basis?
Tamara Weber:
In the United States, I like this figure because it makes it a little bit more realistic for me, but in the United States, the amount of food that gets wasted is the equivalent of about 500 pounds for every man, woman, and child annually. So it's a lot of food. In Kansas City, we're no different from any other city in the United States, so there's a lot of food getting wasted here. Our organization recovers and redirects anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 pounds a week. So we can feed between 700 and 800 families a take-home family dinner at least once a week with the amount of food that we recover, so like 2,500 to 3,000 meals a week.
Kelly Scanlon:
So you are certainly making an impact. Do you get feedback about your efforts? Do you ever hear any response to it?
Tamara Weber:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's actually one of our favorite things, as my staff, we love hearing from the families that receive our meals. And a lot of times that information, it does get passed on to us from the organizations that distribute. I like to especially hear from families who say that their kids are trying vegetables maybe that they haven't tried before, because everything that we distribute is restaurant quality. It's well-prepared green beans. We hear a lot from the kids really like the broccoli that we distribute because it's well-prepared, it's seasoned well, it's really good tasting food.
We had one family, one mom who told me... Sometimes we'll get, because we're getting food from a variety of different caters and food service, sometimes we'll combine things. So we'll get quinoa from one organization and we'll get chicken breast from another. So we'll combine the chicken breast with the quinoa into kind of like a bowl, like a quinoa bowl. And we had one mom say, "I don't know what that rice thing was," meaning the quinoa, and she couldn't pronounce it, and I didn't know what quinoa was five, six years ago either, but she's like, "It was really good."
So we're getting them to try things that they might not otherwise try. And maybe the kids who like our green beans start asking for green beans. And now if the mom knows that the child will eat it, then they'll buy it. Because if you have a limited amount of money to spend each week on groceries, you're not going to spend it on something if you don't think your kid's going to eat it.
Kelly Scanlon:
Exactly. Yeah. No, that's a great point.
Tamara Weber:
So if we could get them to try broccoli or green beans and now the mom knows that their child will eat it, then maybe she'll buy broccoli and green beans because it's not going to get wasted.
Kelly Scanlon:
You mentioned a little bit earlier that there's an environmental impact as well with food waste. So how are you helping to counter that?
Tamara Weber:
Yeah, I think the stats are something like food waste accounts for something like 10% of all of the greenhouse gas emissions. So it's a big component of greenhouse gas emissions, and it's a pretty fixable component too. It's one thing to try to convert, if you're driving a gas-powered vehicle, to convert that to electric. But if you just don't put food in the landfill, that's a little bit of an easier solve.
So yeah, so anything that we keep from going into a landfill is less greenhouse gases, less climate change impact. And I don't know that every pound that we distribute would've gotten wasted, but we're making sure that the majority of the food that would've otherwise gotten wasted is instead getting redirected to families who can use it.
Kelly Scanlon:
Exactly. You have a culinary school too. Tell us about that.
Tamara Weber:
I started piloting our food recovery program in the fall of 2019, so we're just five years old. In January, I incorporated and applied for our 501(c)(3), and we got our 501(c)(3) approval the same week that Kansas City went into lockdown. So all of the organizations that had signed on and were excited to start donating food literally shut down overnight.
But I had made commitments specifically with Operation Breakthrough. My initial food distribution partner was, and still remains Operation Breakthrough. Fortunately, we're able to get food to a lot of other organizations as well. But initially, I was working with Operation Breakthrough, getting food for their families, and COVID happened, and all of that incoming food literally stopped overnight. But I still was looking for ways to get food for these families.
So we participated in some of the initiatives that the restaurant industry was doing in Kansas City where restaurants were cooking for the community. We helped with some of that. And then we started another program. One of my board members had the idea of going to the Shawnee Mission School District. They have a culinary arts program called Broadmoor Bistro, it's actually a restaurant there on the school campus, and asked the program if the students would prepare meals for the families that we serve, if I provided all of the ingredients and the supplies. And it was COVID, so they were looking for different things-
Kelly Scanlon:
Something to do, yeah.
Tamara Weber:
... for their kids to get involved in. So they said, sure, they would pilot it. And I was able to, fortunately, get funding for that from the Mahomes Foundation. So Patrick and Brittany Mahomes funded the initial launch. I called the program Kids Feeding Kids to differentiate it from our food recovery.
And the first event was a success. I had some additional schools inquire and come on board and also do what we called a meal event. So those first couple of meal events, the kids were preparing up to 1,000 servings of a meal. So like Shawnee-
Kelly Scanlon:
That's a lot for kids to be fixing.
Tamara Weber:
Yeah. The students at Broadmoor Bistro, the first event was they prepared 250 chicken pot pies, homemade chicken pot pies. Hy-Vee donated bagged salad. So each family got to take home a pot pie and a bagged salad, so enough for four people, so 1,000 meals. And the other schools, not everyone did chicken pot pies, some people did pasta and meatballs and whatever they were able to prepare.
So that program really kind of took on a life of its own, and I didn't think it would live beyond COVID, but clearly, there was interest and the students and the teachers enjoyed having an opportunity to actually cook for their community. They were cooking for their class requirements, but this was an opportunity to also serve their community as they were learning basic culinary skills.
So that program now is not just, I'm no longer just dropping off ingredients. We actually have a whole curriculum, set of lesson plans where we teach the kids about the root causes of food insecurity, the challenges and problems related to food waste, and then it does culminate in the students preparing anywhere from 250 servings to up to 1,000 servings. We have recipes now that we provide so that we can better manage and control what our cost and what the outputs are going to be. And that program, we're in 40 high schools across Kansas and Missouri this year, this school year, and we're working to grow that by training more teachers to implement the program.
Kelly Scanlon:
And so much learning going on. They're not only getting some academic background, like you say, about the environmental issues and so forth, but they're also getting the hands-on practical. And then it sounds like maybe even a little bit about food budget too.
Tamara Weber:
Yeah, we have a budget of how much each serving is going to cost. Yeah, so the ingredients that they purchase have to stay within our budgeted per-meal cost. If they want to scale up or scale down the recipe, we provide support for that, but there is still some kitchen math that goes on in the process of planning and preparing the meals.
Kelly Scanlon:
So what are some of the challenges that Pete's Garden faces? You got all this food, you got all these thousands of meals, there's some logistics involved there, and continuing to identify credible sources of the food and just getting it distributed, how do you address all of those?
Tamara Weber:
Yeah, the biggest challenge that we have still is something that you alluded to earlier about concerns about the liability. And even though, like I said, this Bill Emerson Act, this law has been on the books since 1996, and the National Restaurant Association is doing education and outreach to their members to make sure that their members know it's safe to donate food, it's legal to donate food, that still tends to be our biggest hurdle we'll hear from, especially smaller restaurants or individual caterers. Usually, the big national companies like Aramark or Sysco or Compass Foods, at a national level, they know that this is the right thing to do, and big corporations have sustainability initiatives. So it's not usually a problem with the national organizations. It's the smaller, independently owned caterers or restaurants that still have some of those misconceptions about donations or they might've had a bad experience in the past.
So then again, that gets back to my responsibility to make sure that our food donors feel confident in my organization and our processes and everything that we're doing to make sure food is safe. I always say I would never distribute anything that I wouldn't take home and feed my own kids. We're continuing to grow, and next year I'm hoping to bring on a VISTA, an AmeriCorps volunteer to work with us to do some capacity building around our fundraising and development, because as the organization gets bigger, there's more complexities, more funding requirements that I need.
But we're managing our growth so that we can keep our cost per meal, so I always look at everything on a cost per meal basis. It does not ever cost us more than $2.50 cents per meal to distribute, and that's a restaurant quality made-from-scratch meal. I feel really good about that as an indicator of the value that we're providing to the community. So I can tell my funders, "This is our cost, this is our operating cost to get meals out to the community that otherwise might get wasted."
Kelly Scanlon:
Right. When you talk about growth, are you talking about being able to feed more people? Because obviously, there continues to be a need and it's actually growing in spite of the efforts of organizations like Pete's Garden. So is it in terms of more meals? Is it in terms of wraparound kinds of services and programs like the Kids Feeding Kids program? What does that growth look like to you?
Tamara Weber:
To me, our growth in Kansas City, I want to get to a point where no good prepared food is ever getting thrown out in Kansas City. So if it's not getting redirected to Pete's Garden, it's getting redirected to another organization that can get it to feed people. So we still have a ways to go to get there. We just received a federal grant to support the growth of our food recovery efforts. And as part of that grant, I believe that we have the opportunity to double the amount of food that we're taking in and therefore double the amount of meals that we're getting out.
Beyond that, there's an opportunity for Pete's Garden and for myself to work with other cities and other communities who don't have a similar kind of food recovery program in place to set up something like Pete's Garden. And in fact, this federal grant that we just got, part of it is to continue to scale up and demonstrate the success of what we're doing. But a bigger part of it is to do outreach to other communities and other cities to show them what's possible-
Kelly Scanlon:
To replicate what you're doing. Yeah. So that you don't have to be the one doing it, but you teach, train the trainer sort of thing.
Tamara Weber:
Yes.
Kelly Scanlon:
Yeah. Okay. You mentioned volunteers. How can people get involved with Pete's Garden? If this is something that appeals to them, what are some of the opportunities for getting involved?
Tamara Weber:
Well, the meals don't pack themselves, so we always need volunteers to pack our meals. So we operate out of Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, their campus at 13th and Broadway. We have our own kitchen right there on campus. So we have, if you go to our website, petesgarden.org, we have a sign up where you can see our slots and what's available. So we always need volunteers to help us pack the meals.
We are starting to get volunteers now to help us deliver the meals to some of the organizations that we serve. So most of the organizations that take our meals are within a five to 10 minute drive of our kitchen. So we're looking for volunteers that can help us with some of that so that my van and my driver can be more focused on picking food up.
And then really helping us get the word out, so if you are... Your favorite restaurant, finding out what do they do with their surplus. Or if you belong to any country clubs or if you are at a big catered event, just asking, "What are you guys doing with this surplus food?" Because if they're not doing anything with it, or if they don't know, then just pass it along that they can donate to Pete's Garden. Because I think no chef or food service manager wants to throw out good food. That's not usually their goal, throwing food out.
Kelly Scanlon:
Right. Yes.
Tamara Weber:
But if they don't know what to do with it and it's 10 o'clock at night and they have 10 extra pounds of chicken breast, it's easier to sometimes just pitch it. But if they know what the options are and that we can make it easy for them to donate, which is really what they want to do anyway, then everyone wins. The chefs and the food service managers know that their food's going to feed people, and moms and dads in Kansas City get to take home a nice meal for their kids.
Kelly Scanlon:
Tamara, thank you so much for everything that you've been doing, you and your team and volunteers as well, for such an important need here in Kansas City. Appreciate that. And anybody who's interested can go out to petesgarden.org and find out more information. And all your contact information is there too, I assume.
Tamara Weber:
Correct, yes.
Kelly Scanlon:
Thank you so much.
Tamara Weber:
Thank you.
Joe Close:
This is Joe Close, president of Country Club Bank. Thank you to Tamara Weber for being our guest on this episode of Banking on KC. Pete's Garden is an example of how one person's willingness to act on an idea can create meaningful change. Through Tamara's leadership, prepared meals that would otherwise be wasted are repurposed into nutritious family dinners, providing comfort and connection for families across Kansas City.
At Country Club Bank, we proudly support initiatives that strengthen our community and create opportunities for all. Organizations like Pete's Garden remind us of the impact we can have when we are willing to take a chance on an idea and work to foster community collaboration. Thanks for tuning in this week. We're banking on you, Kansas City. Country Club Bank, member FDIC.