Financial Transparency
"Why are you asking for donations if you get the food for FREE?"
We get this question so often, we decided to give it its own page on the website!
FoodCommune is a freegan co-op and thus rescues all of our food, i.e., we operate like a junk removal service for people and organizations who have excess food that they want gone. Even though we often do not pay any money directly to the food donor in exchange for the food itself in a given rescue, we do have to pay the costs of rescuing this food. Food rescue has a huge overhead cost. Rescuing food from a landfill and distributing it to people involves finding, picking up, unboxing, sorting, preparing, loading, transporting, storing, refrigerating/freezing, displaying, etc. large quantities of food, which takes a tremendous amount of time AND money.
These daily/weekly/monthly operating costs total approximately $30,000 annually. If you're curious about the details of these costs, you can see the full 2021 budget workup here.
More information on what we could do with more financial donations here.
FreeFoodCommune
Donations and Volunteers
FOOD DONATIONS WELCOME:
If you know of a business (restaurant, store, caterer, etc.) that has excess food that they need to get rid of, please encourage them to donate this food to us, so that we can divert it to people who would use and appreciate it. Donate, don’t dump!
DONATIONS AND VOLUNTEERS NEEDED:
We are NOT externally funded. Instead, we are entirely self-sustaining. Thus, we depend not only on our FOOD DONORS, but on two key groups of people for the conscientious repurposing of this donated food:
1) We depend on our PAYING MEMBERS (SPONSORS) each week to help ease some of our operating costs: the costs of getting all this food gathered, sorted, loaded, transported, stored, chilled, etc.
2) We depend on our VOLUNTEERS each Saturday at the church to get the food unloaded, fully sorted, arranged, and bagged so that its presentation makes for a convenient and pleasant shopping experience for all attendees.
Food To Go & What To Expect
What kinds of food will you get?
All the kinds of food that you get at any grocery store!
Fresh produce (fruits and vegetables), meats, meals, pantry items (cans, mac and cheese, etc.), salads, dairy (milk, yogurt, cheese), breads, desserts, and more. Plus a variety of health supplements.
You will NOT be getting a prepackaged box of food. Rather, you will be filling your big plastic tote bins with items that YOU select from the tables.
The shopping time for Sponsors is divided into two rounds:
Round 1: 12:00-12:30: produce and pantry
Round 2: 12:50-1:20: cold foods, including meat, dairy, more produce, and other refrigerated and frozen items.
Between these two rounds, you will wait for 20 minutes between 12:30-12:50 while we restock the tables.
Another option is to do Grab N Go. Between 12:00-3:30, come and choose any amount of items! 12:00-1:30 is $2/item, 1:30-3:30 is $1/item.