PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (Thurs., Aug. 20, 2026) — This Hunger Awareness Month (September), volunteers across North America will celebrate a milestone they could only have achieved together: one million food rescues completed through the use of the Food Rescue Hero technology platform. Used by organizations across North America, the resource has empowered some 63,000 teachers, artists, small business owners, stay-at-home parents, service workers, retirees, students, and more to prevent surplus food from going to waste by transporting it to people who need it.
The story of Food Rescue Hero begins in Pittsburgh, with homegrown nonprofit 412 Food Rescue, which was founded in 2015 to solve the disconnect between food waste and food need. Founder Leah Lizarondo saw that most food waste isn’t a supply problem but a logistics problem — good food sitting in the wrong place while people who need it are only a few miles away. Her solution was simple yet innovative: take the sort of technology used by for-profit ridesharing and food delivery companies and reimagine it as a tool for mobilizing communities to do good. As Lizarondo put it, “Technology is important, but it’s the power of collective action that will drive massive change.”
The result was the creation of the Food Rescue Hero technology platform, which launched in 2016. Constantly informed by the on-the-ground insights of the working food rescue that created it, the platform enables hunger-relief and food-recovery organizations to launch and scale food rescue.
It includes an app for volunteers that makes claiming rescues easy and convenient, guiding users every step of the way from pickup to delivery. Through this tool, members of the community become the bridge between, on one end, the grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias and other businesses with surplus food to donate and, on the other, distribution partners at community centers, veterans programs, churches, public housing facilities and other locations where those deliveries can be easily reached by people facing access barriers to nutritious food.
The model is helping to grow food recovery at 25 food rescue organizations in North America, where it has mobilized volunteers to prevent over 290 million pounds of good food from entering the waste stream and more than 570 million pounds of CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere.
These dedicated, flexible and powerful volunteer networks are recovering food across 99 U.S. counties, plus Vancouver, BC, bringing Food Rescue Hero to the brink of one million rescues.
“One million rescues is one million times someone chose to show up for their neighbors and their planet,” says Food Rescue Hero VP of Product Brad Fetchin. “That’s a million moments where nutritious surplus food reached someone who needed it, instead of a landfill. This milestone doesn’t belong to any single organization. It belongs to every volunteer across the network who said yes to one more pickup, to every leader who had the courage to start a food rescue organization, and to the ingenuity behind the Food Rescue Hero app, which features purpose-built technology that turns a good intention into a completed pickup in minutes.”
“The need hasn’t gone anywhere. But the tool that tracked it is gone, and safety nets meant to catch it are fraying,” says Food Rescue Hero CEO Alyssa Cholodofsky. “When a problem stops being tracked, it becomes easier to look away and easier to pretend it isn’t there. Food Rescue Hero refuses to do so. Hunger is still here in our communities, and so are we. We will not ignore hunger.”
Neither will the community that Food Rescue Hero has activated.
“We were founded on the principle that people are wired for good, and our network has validated that belief many times over,” says Cholodofsky. “Volunteer-powered food rescue is a model that can scale when paired with the right technology tools. We have the results to prove it in Pittsburgh and across our partner network, and we are expanding our impact every day. The journey to the next million rescues starts today. ”
About Food Rescue Hero™:
Food Rescue Hero is a technology platform that enables food recovery and hunger relief organizations to launch and scale food recovery in their communities. In the United States, as much as 40% of the food produced is wasted while one in ten people goes hungry. Food waste is also one of the leading causes of greenhouse gas emissions. Focusing on the logistical challenges of retail food recovery, Food Rescue Hero addresses the challenges of food waste, food insecurity and climate change through technology-coordinated, community-powered networks.
Since its launch in 2016, the Food Rescue Hero Network, made up of 25 partner organizations in the US and Canada, and a growing community of 63K volunteer drivers, has diverted more than 290 million pounds (the equivalent of more than 240 million meals) of perfectly good food from the landfill and mitigated over 570 million pounds of CO2 emissions.
About 412 Food Rescue:
Driven by the belief that good food belongs to people, not landfills, 412 Food Rescue launched in Pittsburgh, PA, in March 2015 with the mission to rescue fresh surplus food and deliver it where it’s needed most, leveraging people-powered technology and strong community partnerships to tackle both food insecurity and climate change. Today, it is the largest volunteer food rescue organization in the country with a growing community of 26,000+ volunteers.
Since more than 80% of the food for pick up is fresh, timely delivery is essential. 412 Food Rescue developed an innovative, integrated technology platform, Food Rescue Hero, which includes a proprietary app that makes claiming food rescues easy and convenient, guiding each volunteer every step of the way from pick up to delivery. Food Rescue Hero is licensed for use at 25 food rescue organizations in North America.
