Food Fight

Adam Lowy : Move For Hunger

New Jersey native, Springsteen fan, and ASU Sun Devil for life, Adam founded Move For Hunger in the summer of 2009. Adam’s family has owned a moving company in New Jersey for nearly 100 years (dating back to Great Grandpa Lowy). After years of seeing so much food wasted when people move, Adam decided to take action.

When he’s not working, thinking, and talking about Move For Hunger, you can probably find Adam lying on the beach or sitting at the piano jamming with friends. His passion for helping others is contagious. Feel free to reach out – he’d love to talk to you!

As for the serious stuff: Adam proudly represents the New York City Hub of the World Economic Forum’s Global Shapers Community. In 2011 he became a Bluhm/Helfand Social Innovation Fellow and was honored at the VH1 Do Something Awards for his commitment to creating social change. Adam was also honored in Forbes 30 Under 30 in the Food & Drink category in 2014.

Andra : Adam, can you tell our readers a bit about your personal journey and what inspired you to start Move For Hunger?

Adam : My family has run a moving company in New Jersey for about a hundred years. We noticed that people often left food behind when they moved, so we started a simple initiative: asking if they wanted to donate their food. Surprisingly, in just one month, we collected 300 pounds of food. We learned that people want to do good, but they don’t always know how or where to help. When making it super easy and bringing a food drive into people’s living rooms, our clients chose to help neighbors in need.

Delivering that initial donation to my local food bank, I learned about hunger for the first time. They told me there are 140,000 people that don’t have enough to eat in Monmouth County, home of Springstein and Bon Jovi. In my county, you don’t see poverty or food lines or homelessness or any of the stereotypical things you think about when you think about food insecurity – then I learned about all the non stereotypical things that affect populations that are food insecure.

Zooming out and doing more research, not only did I learn that 1 in 5 kids in this country don’t have enough to eat, but in addition to that, 38% of the food produced in this country ends up in landfills. So it’s not that we don’t have enough food, we’re literally throwing it away. I figured if my family’s moving company could feed a whole bunch of people in a month simply by asking a question, what would happen when we got others involved?

We’ve now teamed up with more than 1,200 professional movers across all 50 States and Canada, making food recovery part of their daily operations. We’re in the market of educating people. Not people that are signed up for a food bank’s mailing list, or care about hunger initially, but giving people who just happen to be moving, opportunities to take action. We’ve also teamed up with leading relocation management companies. If a company like Google or Facebook is moving any of their thousands of employees a year, they can donate their food when they move. We’ve teamed up with 600,000 apartment units. When residents are moving out, even without a moving company, they can donate their food when they move there. We also do resident engagement food drives, fundraisers and a host of other activities.

In the end, we found that our biggest advantage was access to trucks, drivers and warehouses all across the country. If you ask most food banks or pantries what their biggest challenges are, one of those is always transportation. Aside from helping folks donate their food when they move, which was our origin story if you will, we’re now working with farms, companies, manufacturers and distributors. When a major banana company reached out to us and said “We have 250,000 pounds of bananas at a port in Los Angeles, they’re still green but they arrived a day later than expected, and now the grocery store doesn’t want them anymore,” we were able to scramble within 48 hours to get those bananas recovered and delivered to local food banks in the LA region. Things like that are happening every day. We can’t go pick up little bits of food, but we can pick up truckloads of food. We’re really good at recovering truckloads of food.

Collectively, we have delivered more than 38 million pounds of food over the past 14 years. This year alone, we’ve already hit 7 million pounds of food. By the end of this year we’ll feed 32 million people.

We also do corporate team buildings and awareness campaigns. We just broke a Guinness World Record last month with the Detroit Pistons toppling 13,000 serial boxes like dominoes to raise awareness around hunger and food waste. That’s us from a thousand feet up.

Andra : Can you explain how the collaboration between moving companies and Move for Hunger typically works?

Adam : We don’t mobilize companies, we mobilize industries. We’re currently working with the entire moving & storage industry. Every major line, whether it be Allied North, American Mayflower etc. – they’re working with us and all of the trade associations that are affiliated with them like New Jersey Movers, Warehouses Association and California Movers all the way up to the American Trucking Association. We’ve done the same in the relocation space and the multifamily housing space. We attend a lot of trade shows because that’s where all of our partners are. They are our boots on the ground in every community, whether it be a moving company or or an apartment community.

Spreading our educational materials, engaging their customers, engaging their employees, ultimately helps us do the community work. All of the food that is recovered goes back to local food banks, so we’re not shipping resources across the country. Occasionally, with some large food recovery loads we will, but for the most part we’re trying to keep the food where it is.

We can track exactly how many pounds of food we’ve delivered to any individual food bank and we love data. We’ve got great relationships with a number of relief organizations, from food banks and pantries all the way up to Feeding America at the top. We think about collaboration a fair amount, too. In times of disaster, Feeding America might reach out to us and say, “we have food that we need to get over to Kentucky because of the tornadoes,” or companies reach out to us and say, “Hey, we’d like to make a big donation of food. How do we do this?” and it’s very easy for us to say we’ve got trucks and drivers. They’re excited, they wanna they wanna help. And that’s been a really great thing. We’re not a disaster relief organization, but we’re certainly able to respond in that respect as well.

Andra : Can you share some of the challenges you’ve faced while running Move for Hunger along with any advice you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

Adam : With any business, for profit or non profit, it’s hard, it’s a lot of hard work. There were a lot of things, especially in the early days that didn’t go right. You only know what you know so sometimes you’re making things up, sometimes you’re trying something new and you’re going to get it wrong.

I’ve had partners that have said we’re not going to work with you anymore, and then we’ve had other partners that have been with us for 14 years. We’ve learned, we’ve evolved. I’m very fortunate to have had great mentors from other organizations that have been willing to sit down with me and have lunch and talk about their business models, including folks that aren’t in our space. I had the opportunity to sit down with the founder of Charity Water, an organization that I really admire. Back in the day I had lunch with the executive director of Livestrong, talking about how they think about branding, a decade ago every single person had that yellow wristband on. Essentially taking pieces of all the things that you really like, and scrapping the things that you don’t like.

You don’t get into the nonprofit space to make a ton of money or or get on TV. But at the same time, I’ve had really cool experiences throughout the journey. I’ve flown around the world and spoken at a series of events. We’ve been on award shows on television. Ultimately, you hear stories from food banks and pantries saying “if it weren’t for you, we may not have been able to keep our doors open for another week,” or “we would have been out of food completely”. Hearing those stories is so much fun because we know we’re actually making a difference at the local level. As big as we get, our impact is always localized.

Andra : What do you envision for Move For Hunger in the next decade?

We’ve had a few iterations of the organization thus far. I think we’re probably on our 3rd evolution, 14 years in. We’re really trying to focus on how we can recover the most food and get it to the people that actually need it. We’re currently working with a farm in Kentucky right now that’s been providing food to a pantry close by. We’re now taking that food 100 miles away to another pantry that has struggled with access to fresh resources and protein. That’s been really cool.

We’re reinvesting our existing resources, not thinking about how we go from collecting 7 million pounds of food this year to 8 million, but how we go from 7 to 14 million? How we go from 7 to 20 million? Really thinking about what growth looks like at scale.

It’s not just about transportation. We address access to cold storage on farms to keep food fresh longer, because we know that that is one big barrier they face. Organizations often host gleaning events on farms on the weekends, which is typically when people have time off, but food banks may not be open on the weekends. So how do you keep that food that was just picked out of the ground, cold and fresh for longer?

We’re adding cold storage distribution points that could be shared infrastructure by a lot of food pantries. Only the big Feeding America food banks for the most part, have large walk-in freezers & refrigerators that can accept substantial amounts of food. But then they have to store it and sort it and get it back into the community. If we could build better infrastructure on that front it could be really interesting.

We’re also thinking about mobile processing plans, could you put one on a farm? We’re talking to a farm this week that has so many apples, a ridiculous amount of apples that may keep us busy for the next couple of months. What do you do with that? Certainly you can pick them up, you can recover them, they are pretty shelf stable. In terms of a fresh food item, they’re gonna last a little bit longer. But could you turn them all into applesauce? So then you actually get months and months of time out of the produce?

Those are ideas we’re exploring. I’m not saying it’s what we’re doing but we’re trying to look at the problem in different ways that haven’t been done before and be additive. Food banks already have relationships with grocery stores. They’re already doing pickups. From that regard. We don’t need to be in that game. We need to think about how we deploy the resources that exist now? And if they don’t, how do we create resources and fill some of those gaps. And that’s really what we’re exploring as we think about the next decade ahead.

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