Carla Pellegrini, Executive Director, Food Stash

VFR: Carla, tell us about yourself and the path that led you to working at Food Stash Foundation.

Carla Pellegrini: I began my career in international development. Coming from the US, I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nicaragua for 2.5 years. Following that, I pursued graduate school to dig more into community development, focusing on sustainable and community-driven approaches. It was during this time that I developed a keen interest in operations management within this context.

After completing graduate school, I spent a couple of years working at a nonprofit in Kenya. The organization's mission was to provide seeds, fertilizer, and other essential products to smallholder farmers on credit. In this role, I oversaw a network of warehouses and managed the delivery processes, which served over 150,000 farmers with 10,000+ metric tons of products delivered to their doorsteps. Interestingly, it was at this nonprofit that I met my now-husband. Following our time there, we relocated to Vancouver in 2015 for his work (also nonprofit!).

After a brief year getting settled into Vancouver working for a for-profit tech start-up, I realized I needed to get back into the social impact space. I worked for almost five years at a B Corp impact investing company that built and invested in affordable housing and provided loans to nonprofits, charities, and co-ops. I was the first full-time employee and got to help build the organization and all of the systems and operations that supported it. In 2021 I was looking for a new challenge and stumbled upon Food Stash — the Executive Director position was (and continues to be!) the perfect mix of my operations management and logistics expertise combined with really impactful local community development work and a great leadership opportunity.

VFR: Like VFR, Food Stash is another Metro Vancouver food recovery organization. Tell us about your food recovery work and the additional food programs Food Stash operates.

CP: Yes, VFR and Food Stash do a lot of similar work! Like VFR, at Food Stash, we deliver surplus food to other nonprofits across Vancouver. Currently, we rescue about 130,000 pounds of food per month (1.5 million pounds in 2023!), mostly from grocery stores and wholesalers. Additionally, we deliver about 80% of that food to 36 other organizations.

In addition to that program, we also operate two programs where we directly serve the community. One is our home delivery program, which provides weekly grocery deliveries to 120 low-income households with chronic illnesses or disabilities. With the help from a lot of volunteers, we sort through the food that returns to our warehouse and lovingly pack and customize their groceries, ensuring they receive the food they want and need to eat. Rescued Food Box members pay $10 per box to help cover the cost of delivery.

We also operate a weekly Rescued Food Market that is open to the public every Thursday from 3 - 7 pm. Registration is required to ensure equitable and timely service for everyone. Market members sign up for a three-month period and receive a designated appointment time to shop for food. There's a membership fee of $2 per week, which helps cover some of the costs of running the Market, and the food itself is free.

Finally, we played a role in setting up the Mount Pleasant Community Fridge and regularly contribute food to it. The community fridge serves as a low-barrier source of food access and mutual aid, where anyone can contribute to or take from it.

The overarching theme across all our programs is dignified food access. We work hard to ensure that our programs are low-barrier (we never ask for ID or conduct income testing) and empower recipients to choose the food they want to eat.

VFR: VFR and Food Stash work together in many different ways. Please share about some of our partnership initiatives and why collaboration is so incredibly important in the nonprofit space.

CP: We value our partnership with VFR so much! There is so much good food out there that is unnecessarily being slated for waste streams, so the more actors in this food recovery space, the better.

VFR and Food Stash operate in a really complementary way — VFR with volunteers in personal vehicles and Food Stash with paid drivers in big trucks. We are constantly coordinating with each other to make sure that we're using our staff and volunteer resources effectively and efficiently. If Food Stash gets wind of a food donation that doesn't make sense for a big truck, we'll loop in VFR and vice versa with VFR leaning on Food Stash to help with larger volume donations.

We have also partnered on a lot of community engagement and advocacy work. To name a few, we co-hosted a sold-out film screening of Food Is My Teacher, and together, we developed a political brief about food waste and the food recovery sector that was shared with City of Vancouver Councillors. Currently, we are collaborating on a project with the City to amplify and formalize the work of Vancouver's food recovery network (stay tuned!).

The nonprofit sector plays a crucial role in both preventing good food from going to waste and providing emergency food access to the community. However, there is very limited funding available to support the work of organizations like VFR, Food Stash, and many others. Collaborating and joining forces allows us to stretch our limited resources further and advocate for long-term change.

VFR: You recently did a TED Talk on food waste, which is awesome! What was that experience like and what were some of the main themes you were trying to convey during the talk?

CP: It was a wild experience! I don't generally seek out speaking engagements like this, so it was a big stretch and challenge for me to even consider applying after the TEDx Surrey team reached out suggesting that I do so! The TEDx Surrey team of volunteers organizing the event are so experienced at curating TEDx talks and events. Each of the 12 speakers had a dedicated (volunteer) coach with at least weekly coaching sessions. We also had regular group coaching sessions. Over the course of 13 weeks, I logged more than 100 hours of coaching and practice leading up to the talk. It was pretty surreal to not feel nervous getting onto the stage in front of 1,000 people to give my talk live. It's even more surreal to see it online and reaching so many people across the world now. 

With any TED talk, the goal is to make it digestible, so simplicity was key. I gave a big picture overview of how food waste is so connected to climate change, and then focused on some everyday ways that we, as individuals, can do something about it. It's really easy to feel hopeless in the face of climate change, so my goal was to share some tangible and realistic actions we can each take — like shopping for ugly produce, rethinking date labels, and planning out our meals. 

VFR: It’s really tricky trying to fit everything into a 12-minute talk! Carla, if you were able to give a longer talk, what are some additional points you would bring up and share with others?

So many things! First — food waste is an incredibly complex issue. Deeply ingrained systems and behaviours reinforce it in numerous ways, and individual actions alone aren't sufficient to address it. We need a comprehensive, robust, and coordinated set of policies, political will, a shift in business models, and individual action to make significant progress.

For instance, measures could include requiring businesses to measure and report their food waste, mandating that all edible surplus food be donated, funding and compensating food recovery nonprofits for their hauling services, discouraging bulk purchases that lead to overconsumption and waste, relaxing aesthetic standards for produce sales, and simplifying (or clarifying) date labels.

I also really wanted to dig into the misconception that we will solve food insecurity with food. Giving people free or low-cost food will not one day make them better able to go buy their food from a grocery store. Food insecurity is the result of poverty, and you can't solve poverty with food alone.

Instead, we need to focus on income-based solutions, such as universal basic income, living wages, and social assistance rates that adjust for inflation. Additionally, initiatives like affordable housing can help preserve income.

Governments and societies have institutionalized the food bank/charitable model of distributing food rather than remembering that it was always meant to be a temporary response to an emergency situation (recession in the 1980s). We still need the charitable food sector in the interim to address hunger, but long-term we need to tackle poverty if we really want to address food insecurity.