Conversation with Adam Lowy, Founder and ED of Move For Hunger.
Adam shares about the landscape of food insecurity in the US and the need for year-round support for food banks - not just around Thanks Giving.  Move for Hunger is also succeeding with great in person truck pulling events that raise food, funds and awareness across the US. 
 
Video from the truck pull event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hwJTpFHZQ8 
 
 
 
Rough Transcript
[00:00:00] Well, we've got a returning guest, Adam Lowie, founder and executive director of Move for Hunger, move for Hunger, mobilizes Transportation Resources to reduce food waste and fight hunger. And we're gonna get into how they're doing that. They were founded in 2009. So Adam, you've been at it for quite some.
[00:00:47] We met actually back in the day, my former life as Chief Technology officer of do something.org. When Adam Lowie was, was it at that time a Brick Award winner? A Do something award winner Do do something, yeah. I think it was the Do Something award technically at that point, yes. A do something. I think I still have my little exclamation point trophy from back in the day.
[00:01:11] Well, these were the sort of best of the best of young entrepreneurs in the social impact world. And I, I remember Adam at the time and we stayed friends and we stayed friends. He was a member of the New York City Global Shaper community and has really built something incredible at Move for Hunger. So, In, in your words, can you remind us, because obviously all of our audience listens to every single one of our over 250 episodes.
[00:01:40] remembers all of our guests. Can you remind us how Move for Hunger does what they do best? Absolutely. So we started, as you mentioned, 13 years ago, out of my family's moving company. We saw folks leaving behind or throwing away food when they were moving, and started to ask that question, do you wanna donate food when you.
[00:02:00] Turns out people wanna do good. You just have to make it super easy. And in this case, we were bringing a food drive into people's living rooms. Uh, today we have trained more than 1100 professional moving companies across the US and Canada to make food recovery a core part of the way they do business.
[00:02:18] We've expanded from just movers to work with relocation management companies, temp housing providers. We work with more than 600,000 apartment units, for folks moving in the multi-family industry. And we're also now tackling fresh food. So for us it's really about, ensuring that we can mobilize transportation networks to be in the right place at the right time to get food to where it needs to be.
[00:02:39] And altogether we've now collected enough food to provide more than 25 million meals, uh, to folks. And it's an incredible number, but also it's an innovative approach. We are, I'd say, generally familiar with how food banks work locally, and I think this is addressing both a problem and opportunity, uh, to, to use these resources, which are, you know, moving trucks and moments, which are moments.
[00:03:08] People relocating their living situation and saying like, yeah, there's a lot of waste in that system. How do we redirect that? And then it seems like you're expanding now to realizing that there's a huge last mile problem. As I understand it for food insecure people in our country there, there's enough food, there's enough planted, grown.
[00:03:33] In our country to feed everyone. However, getting it to where it needs to be is that last mile problem. And it strikes me that trucks are, are a good way to do that. And so maybe a little bit more on how you're expanding there. Yeah. So you kinda hit the nail on the head there. 35% of food produced in the United States ends up in landfills.
[00:03:57] And if you zoom out globally 28% of the world's farmable land. Grows food that will never be eaten which is just a wild number, you know, to think about. Hmm. and all of this, well, you know, there's now 38 millio