Santa Clara County partnership gives surplus food to people in need

Santa Clara County is taking a unique approach to prevent food waste: bring it directly to the people who need it most.

Last year, the county started a food recovery program to install commercial refrigerators in affordable housing developments and stock them with produce and ready-to-eat meals. It partnered with nonprofit Martha’s Kitchen to deliver the food twice a week. Now residents in five affordable housing sites — including San Jose’s Curtner Studios and Iamesi Village and three others in Mountain View and Palo Alto — can have fresh food right at their fingertips. More sites are being established at no ongoing cost to the county.

“If you make healthy food available, you make (being) healthy easy,” Martha’s Kitchen Executive Director Bill Lee told San José Spotlight. “It’s part of the county’s effort to implement Senate Bill 1383 passed in 2022, which set statewide standards to recover 20% of edible food being disposed by 2025. It also required local jurisdictions to establish food recovery programs and organizations to maintain records of donated food.”

The county program is being managed by research firm Joint Venture Silicon Valley’s Food Recovery Initiative, which works with cities to ensure edible food is not thrown out.

“There are a number of organizations working hard to provide meals and grocery items to residents in affordable housing, such as Martha’s Kitchen, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley, Loaves & Fishes and Peninsula Food Runners, and there is still so much opportunity to serve this population,” Ciara Low, associate director for the Food Recovery Initiative, said in a statement. “This pilot was designed to complement these programs by offering residents of affordable housing more frequent, convenient and regular access to fresh foods where they live.”

Prior to SB 1383 being passed, Lee said grocery stores would be reluctant to give the nonprofit food with limited shelf life for fear of legal repercussions. Now, these grocery stores and businesses are mandated to give away the maximum amount of edible food to prevent it from ending up in landfills. The bill simultaneously tackles food insecurity, food waste and climate change, since the waste emits methane.

“So it’s really kind of been a triple benefit to society,” Lee said.

Families in the county are grappling with food insecurity as food stamp participation is at its highest level in the past decade, with 130,000 individuals receiving benefits. Food banks have been stretched thin with more people in need of help. Second Harvest of Silicon Valley provides produce for half a million people every month.

Lee said organizations like Martha’s Kitchen, which prepare and deliver food to homeless shelters and other places across the region, fill an important gap that food banks can’t.
There are three ways food is donated — wholesale distributors that store food in warehouses, grocery stores and organizations in the food business like restaurants, health facilities and hotels. Food donated from the last category is the hardest to handle because of its short shelf life, Lee said

“Once again, California leads the way,” Lee said. “Hopefully, as we get more years into this, the other 49 states are going to realize this makes sense.This is not an excessive burden to the businesses. It’s just a matter of capitalizing it.”

Contact Joyce Chu at [email protected] or @joyce_speaks on X.